the ultimate saya sebuah basikal story

Quick explanation: one of the more common essay formats assigned to primary schoolchildren in Malaysia is to imagine oneself as an inanimate object, e.g. "Saya sebatang pen" (I Am a Pen) or "Saya sebuah basikal" (I Am a Bicycle). The stories usually follow the format of - I am purchased in a bright shiny new condition - A bad child abuses me and throws me away - I am lying desolate at the side of the road - A good child picks me up and cleans me off - I am happy!

A couple of years ago I wrote this little story but I forgot about it until recently.

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When you are very young, you hear about certain things that people talk about all the time; you imagine them, but never fully applying them to yourself. So when such a thing happens, the shock is almost pure. Many states of mind and body occur in a very short time. Fright - what have I done? Nausea, but briefly. A sensation of having been ravished, stripped, and torn. You feel like you're flying, and it ends with a strangely electrical jolt.

So death happened to me one day on the way to work by way of a careless right turn in front of an equally careless lorry running a red light. Once a physics teacher demonstrated a collision between large and small bodies, by dropping a ping-pong ball on top of a basketball. After the basketball hit the floor and bounced back, its motion was barely altered by collision, but the ping-pong ball shot up to the ceiling with surprising velocity.

So it was.

The shock of hitting the ground was so great that I was beyond pain in an instant. I could still see – gray asphalt, white paint, glittering chips of metal and plastic, and hear the honking and shouts, but washing out all other sensation was the impact, which echoed through my body for long seconds like a gunshot in a cavern.

The black-and-white painted curb of the road median was staring at me. Moiré patterns, like those seen through the cage of an oscillating fan, began to appear on the white parts. The scene began to wobble back and forth in synchrony with a whooshing sound, which I realised was my pulse. The gray splotches of the pattern grew larger, and then consumed all sight.

Cars stopped, people came. Someone called an ambulance.

Even with no sensation, I wanted to scream as they pulled us apart, disentangling my shattered limbs from the bicycle frame. Even retrospectively, I can’t say if this is the moment my soul fled to its new home. Those first few minutes after the crash were so numbed and disoriented that the entity I call myself might have inhabited both dying flesh and inanimate steel, as if the lorry were a hammer forging two metals into one piece.

The crowd moved about, dispersing slowly as the ambulance attendants laid my body on a stretcher. Someone had the presence of mind to place the hand-painted bike helmet on my chest, a touch I would have appreciated. The ambulance left, and still I lay on the pavement, wrecked.

I would have cried out but found myself voiceless.

Hands gripped me again. You took your time, I thought. I counted the light and the darkness, and surely someone should have noticed I was still here in less than two days. Bones ached and tendons screamed as I was lifted up. They forced me to stand, and in the haze of pain flared a spark of indignation that someone in my condition should be made to walk. Insistent, my rescuer pushed me forward, and I limped along, twisted rear wheel squeaking against the brakes.

Something was wrong then, I knew – people don’t have wheels. As my rescuer pushed me, I took a mental inventory of my parts. Except for the damage to them, the sensations of having wheels that rotated at hubs and handlebars that turned on a stem seemed perfectly natural, even though my mind said otherwise. When the person pushing me applied the brakes on a downhill and the cables pulled smoothly instead of with cramp-like stiffness, I would have sighed with relief were it possible.

I felt no panic or fear at the realisation, nor have I felt anything like them since. Perhaps it comes from being made of steel, with nothing like a hormone or a neurotransmitter to feel those emotions with.

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the ultimate saya sebuah basikal story by Xenobiologista is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Malaysia License.
Based on a work at xenobiologista.com.
the ultimate saya sebuah basikal story by Xenobiologista is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

The Pain of the Problem of Pain

My Bible study group usually does "weird stuff" for the summer to mix things up a bit. Since it's a grad student Bible study, our meetings tend to be kind of like seminar classes...everybody reads the text then we chew it over. Two summers ago, we did some of the Apocrypha, and last year we did medieval Christianity. Let me tell you, Wycliffe in the original is very funny to read.

Anyway this summer we're doing CS Lewis' "The Problem of Pain" on Brian's suggestion. I've read maybe 3/4 of Lewis' books, but not this one yet.

Some people accuse Lewis of being sexist (e.g. Philip Pullman advertising his His Dark Materials trilogy as the atheist kids' alternative to the Chronicles of Narnia), but frankly they're failing to keep in mind that Lewis was writing in the '40s and '50s and is considerably less sexist than the average male from that time. I am also informed that the books that were written after he got married are better in that regard than those written when he was a crusty bachelor, like this one. Nevertheless, this is a really, REALLY bad phrasing:

...the rough, male taste of reality, not made by us, or, indeed, for us, but hitting us in the face.

I guess that, by being totally grossed out by this sentence, I'm leaving myself vulnerable to the medieval accusation that women are sinful creatures obsessed with sex. But seriously, eugh.

My top 15 books

Don't take too long to think about it. List 15 books you've read that will always stick with you -- list the first 15 you can recall in 15 minutes. Don't take too long to think about it.

1. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. Historical murder mystery with lots of debates about the power of reason, the Church, language, literature, etc.
2. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. He always intended it to be one volume but the publisher made him split it. It was finally republished as one volume shortly before the Peter Jackson movies came out, but I still like the watercolours he made for the covers of the 3-volume set my parents have.
3. The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker. Sociological and evolutionary evidence for the existence of a hardwired human nature, and why it's necessary to morality whereas the modern and postmodern view of an infinitely malleable tabula rasa is not.
4. Where Monsoons Meet by anonymous. Cartoon history of Malaysia from the Malacca Sultanate, through colonization, to independence and the Emergency. The subtitle "A People's History" should have clued me in to where the author(s) were coming from, but I first read it at about age 12. It totally ruined my education since I never believed anything we were taught in Sejarah class after that.
5. I want to put one Asimov book in this list and can't decide between Foundation's Edge and the Robot Dreams anthology.
6. Mat Som by Lat. Graphic novel about a young guy from the kampung trying to make a living in KL. I have both the original and Adibah Amin's English translation; she seems to have done a decent job.
7. Where There Is No Doctor by David Werner. The bible for rural healthcare workers. I first read it at age 7 or so and that's what got me started on infectious diseases. I have a faint memory of carrying a book as big as my torso into the kitchen to ask "Mama, how do you pronounce T-E-T-A-N-U-S?"
8. Gilbert's Developmental Biology. Best college textbook I've ever owned. Beautiful illustrations and photos.
9. Gods That Failed by Vinoth Ramachandra. An overview of the false gods of this age (including a few movements from within the church itself).
10. The Sandman - well, yes, it's either 75 comic books or 10 paperback, so not technically "a book". But it's arguably a continuous story arc, and definitely by the same author. Maybe I should just get the 4-volume Absolute Sandman eventually.
11. CRC Press' Recombinant Poxviruses. My favourite work-related book, very comprehensive. A lot of new stuff has been done in the 17 (!) years since its publication, but it's a good overview of poxvirus biology and what to do with them.
12. Kine by A.R. Lloyd. Watership Down for predators - valiant English weasels fighting an invasion of the evil American mink (note: Mink are also in the weasel family but they mass about 20 times and measure about three times the length of Least Weasels. They became an invasive species in the UK after being introduced for fur farming, which is another reason Fur Is Bad).
13. Watership Down by Richard Adams. Er...I guess you can tell I like animals.
14. Sejarah Melayu by Tun Sri Lanang ("Sejarah Melayu" means "The History of the Malays"). My Malay sucks so reading this was a struggle but worthwhile. It starts out very fairytaleish and legendary (e.g. descendant of Alexander the Great travels from India to Indonesia in a magic bubble under the ocean) and becomes more historical as you move forward in time. The part near the end that describes the Portuguese slaughter of the Malaccans who had never seen firearms, made me cry.
15. Infinity's Shore by David Brin (and the rest of his Uplift series). I think many physicists who write science fiction tend to be lacking in their understanding of human nature and write wooden, stereotyped characters (Stephen Baxter being a spectacularly bad example), but Brin does great characters of all stripes - both human and non-. Also, he does very funny aliens. One of the few exceptions to my rule that if an author feels the need to put a cast of characters and glossary up front, that means he/she did a crappy job of introducing them in the story. His Civilization of the Five Galaxies is HUGE.

OK...I disobeyed the instruction to "don't take too long" since I just spent 15 minutes writing this.

story - Death of a Heretic

Looking through my old files because I'm reading HP Lovecraft's The Silver Key...it's true, the legends of dread and glory we each carry in our hearts are precious beyond words. Anyway I found what I wanted to find, a chronicle of my old dreams that maybe no one else will ever read. But I found this story I wrote back in secondary school, which is rather less intimate, but still a reflection of some very personal feelings - in particular, extreme frustration with the boringness of science education in Malaysia.

Those idiots who write the textbooks can take the wonders of the universe and turn them into cold oatmeal. No surprise that a young person might subconsciously file it all under "bullshit".

Death of a Heretic

The teacher had had the microscopes moved outside for better lighting, and now there were girls darting back and forth from the shade of the lab doors to the row of stools like pigeons flying down to feed. “Hei, come and look lah,” called one of her group members. She stepped into the sun reluctantly, twitching her skirt away from sweat-damp legs. Imbeciles, she thought, a blood smear is supposed to be thin, not thick as paint. My blood some more!

“Can see not?”

“Can...I think...I only see small dots...doesn’t look like sel darah merah though.”

Grimacing, she pushed her way through the clamour and squatted in front of the stool. There certainly were small dots in the field, but they weren’t red blood cells, more likely dust on the inside of the objective.

It’s all futile, she thought. We have a Mandarin teacher for Bio, telling us quite confidently that coconuts contain cholesterol and arthritis is caused by cold. The blind leading the blind indeed. What’s the point of learning all of this anyway? Eritrosit, leukosit, eosinofil, basofil, it’ll all be forgotten in a matter of months as soon as the SPM is over. We might as well be reciting mantras or telling the rosary; it’s nonsense to them.

Maybe it really is all nonsense. Maybe air pollution is good for Earth – it makes fantastic sunsets, at least. Maybe butterflies aren’t the adult form of caterpillars but a winged parasite that devours the chrysalis from within. Maybe menstruation is caused by a dog and a cat fighting in my belly. How should we know? Everything they teach us in school is a pack of lies anyway.

When the school bell rang she still brooded. All this nonsense about cells and hormones and genes is too complicated. When you think about how easily computers crash – the more complicated a system is, the more parts to fail. The simplest living thing would be perpetually on a knife’s edge from death, never mind the trillions of cells supposedly in the human body. I think I’ll be like the ancient Greeks, she decided. Four humours – simple, commonsensical, tangible. Anyone’s seen blood and phlegm; no one’s seen a gene yet. Even traditional Chinese medicine would be better. We know what heaty and windy feel like (well, with my dad, we know what “windy” sounds like too).

Cells are optical illusions. DNA is a deus ex machina for desperate geneticists created by the international conspiracy of Watson and Crick. Maggots can be generated from rotten meat. Malaria is caused by foul vapours. I shall be a heretic! she laughed, and the other kids at the bus stop edged away nervously.

The heat was relentless. In her room, she dropped her pinafore and peeled off the white shirt, sprawling on the bed. The thrum, thrum, thrum of the ceiling fan – the higher frequency rotation modulated by the lower frequency wobble – drew her into a hypnotic state as the sweat dried. She began to feel individual hairs on her arm stand up as the skin cooled. And in the singing of the fan, to hear voices:

“...we...”

“...catch and pull...catch and pull...”

“Drink the salt down, pump it through...”

“...come...us...”

“Halt, stranger, ...not pass.”

“...enough, send no more.”

There was no one in the room. It must have been the neighbours’ voices.

“You are...us.”

“...you hear? ...yourself...”

“...body...speaking to you.”

“How dare...like that...denied us?”

“...sheer ingratitude of the...”

“...why?”

“Nothing but...we are you.”

Then her consciousness exploded with the awareness of everything that had been hidden from the shell she called a mind. Blood flowed with chemical messages like the jungle air to a wild animal. Electrical pulses blazed down neurons, each one with more connections than any computer server could handle. The nanomachines called enzymes churned in her organs, taking in food and expelling toxins. Monocytes crawled through the interstices of her flesh, sniffing, seeking prey.

Even as she realized what the voices were, the whole system that she had turned against rose in retribution. Inflammatory molecules ran through her veins, causing a burning fever and head pain. Muscles twitched, trembled, and convulsed, and she could feel every one of the myosin heads pulling against actin strands in them. She tried to get up but the little stones in her ears had come unglued, leaving her giddy.

Stop, she moaned silently. It’s too fast. It’s too much.

“How...we stop?” they whispered back “...but none...is real, you said...”

I was wrong, she cried. There are so many things... She felt her racing heart slow, beads of sweat on her skin.

“...stop?

Stop. Please.

All stop.

Creative Commons licenses:

Death of a Heretic by Shi-Hsia Hwa is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Death of a Heretic by Hwa Shi-Hsia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Malaysia License.

Critical reading

I don't think I've EVER seen or heard a better piece of advice on reading religious literature:

It is Truth which we must look for in Holy Writ, not cunning of words. All Scripture ought to be read in the spirit in which it was written. We must rather seek for what is profitable in Scripture, than for what ministereth to subtlety in discourse. Therefore we ought to read books which are devotional and simple, as well as those which are deep and difficult. And let not the weight of the writer be a stumbling-block to thee, whether he be of little or much learning, but let the love of the pure Truth draw thee to read. Ask not, who hath said this or that, but look to what he says.

- Thomas A Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, First Book, Chapter V

In case that didn't all sink in, let me break it up into bullet points and add italics:

• It is Truth which we must look for in Holy Writ, not cunning of words.
• All Scripture ought to be read in the spirit in which it was written.
• We must rather seek for what is profitable in Scripture, than for what ministereth to subtlety in discourse. Therefore we ought to read books which are devotional and simple, as well as those which are deep and difficult.
• And let not the weight of the writer be a stumbling-block to thee, whether he be of little or much learning, but let the love of the pure Truth draw thee to read. Ask not, who hath said this or that, but look to what he says.

"Every damn morning"

This is why I started keeping a notebook next to my bed to write down dreams.

Peter Dickinson said that the first chapter of The Weathermonger came to him in a dream. Who knows, I could write a novel.

In case you're wondering, the mouseover text on this xkcd strip is a quote from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, where Lucy sneaks into the magician's rooms to find a spell to restore the Monopods, and reads a spell "for the refreshment of the spirit" that turns into a beautiful reverie, but fades from memory as it ends. This essayist believes that the objects Lucy remembers - a cup, a sword, a tree, and a green hill - are a reference to the agony, death, and resurrection of Christ, the story that all other good stories remind us of in one way or another.

I couldn't quite remember whether it was from Lewis or Tolkien.

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Speaking of the Chronicles of Narnia, FlowerMoonFish and I were discussing the Prince Caspian movie on the phone and she says that the reason Peter and Caspian were written as a pair of testosterone-drenched idiots was that (quoting someone else) "the art of our time can't recognize nobility".

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Speaking of nobility, I hope that Raja Petra's right and our King doesn't let AAB and gang call a snap election to screw around with Pakatan Rakyat's chances of taking over the government. Sure they're mostly figureheads in a parliamentary democracy...and history has proved over and over again that heredity confers nothing in morality or intelligence...yet I still find myself hoping that when needed the Agong will act, with nobility.

2008 New Year's Resolution

I don't normally make New Year's resolutions (e.g. "I will not bite my nails" has been a historical failure since age eight or so) but I've come up with what I think is a viable one this year:

• To match any amount I spend aside from regular groceries, household, and toiletry supplies with donations to NGOs doing food aid, health, education, social justice, or women's issues - both secular and Christian.
• To match ALL spending on my cat with donations to animal welfare (not animal rights) and wildlife conservation organizations.

This way I'll probably spend less money this year on silly stuff and waste less time Internet shopping.

Maybe it sounds a bit extreme to some people but I've found since leaving home and starting to earn my own money at age 18, that the less stuff I buy, the less stuff I want. Materialism is a self-perpetuating lust, and most of the hobbies I really enjoy require very little material.

Other things I'd like to do:

• Write at least 2 short fiction stories and submit at least 1 to Writers of the Future or a science fiction magazine.
• Draw more, and spontaneously.
• Reinstall Creatures 3/Docking Station on my computer and start tinkering with the CAOS (Creatures Agent Object Scripting) language.
• Call parents and sisters and "small" boy more often (sometimes I forget my brother has a phone because he never calls me...)
• Clean my bike more often.
• Cook for my boyfriend and make him take his vitamins regularly.
• Watch more movies.

It's gonna be a personally interesting year...my project is going to get into animal studies...I'll have to write a thesis and hopefully graduate...my parents just got transferred to Penang...two of my London cousins are getting married in the summer so I'll finally have a chance to go to England...a couple of Phases kakis are getting married in Malaysia...another couple is having a baby, which makes them the first friends my age to reproduce...my boyfriend is taking 2/3 of a year off school for an internship...his mum wants to show our respective cats in the summer (TICA lets you show household pets)...

Et cetera. 'Tis life. =)

Whoopsies!

Silverfish Books kinda put its foot in its mouth with this story.

Someone tried to order a book on Malaya from Amazon.com and when an error message came up saying that the book couldn't be shipped to Malaysia, he/she concluded that Amazon was collaborating with the Malaysian government to ban the import of certain books.

Then a reader (scroll to the end of the Silverfish story, read the first comment) pointed out that you simply can't have Amazon Marketplace used books shipped to certain countries. I think there's an option to provide international shipping when you put a used book up for sale on Amazon Marketplace, but you might still need an American credit card to purchase it (i.e. if you were buying from Amazon.com not Amazon.co.uk or some other regional site).

Jumping to Conclusions, are we? =D