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misspalah's review
4.0
Do you know anyone who truly has no fear of spirits? I have come across only two. One is unafraid because he does not believe in them, the other because he does believe in them and in his powers over them. I wish I belonged to either category. But like many people, I neither believe nor disbelieve and so can never shake off the vague fear of them. I would not, for instance, pass through a graveyard at night, sit up alone in a mortuary or stay in a house reputed to be haunted. Would you? It is not so much that I am afraid of what the spirits might do to me, if indeed they exist. It is more that I am afraid of being afraid.
- Assorted Hantus(As i was passing II by Adibah Amin)
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I preferred As I was Passing more compared to the second one. This one was okay but it did not have many witty jokes of what was supposed to be ‘Malaysian’ thing, funny descriptions of Adibah Amin’s keen observation of its people and unusual experience encountered in Malaysian Daily Life. The reason i felt this due to this time, most of the things she wrote were coming from her own daughter (her behavior or specifically her generation). Adibah Amin wrote about generational differences that she felt while raising her daughter. I can understand why she has many stories about her daughter but i cant help to feel that i wanted her own stories / anecdotes instead of her daughter’s. Overall, this is still pretty nostalgic yet fun to read what’s life like for Malaysian back in the 70s and 80s. These are some of the anecdotes that i enjoyed with some memorable quotes in it.
1. From Mum to a Modern Miss : And you, I know, can take my ghazal and keroncong and dondang sayang in small doses and do make an effort to share my joy in them, but when the Pesta Dendang Rakyat season is on and you hear nothing else from the TV set and from me, the strain is apt to show.
2. Conversational Expertise : Someone complained the other day that we are losing the art of conversation and I said to myself: thank God. I grew up in a community that revelled in graceful small talk. The women did it beautifully over the traditional betel set, moving from recipes to reputations with exquisite lightness. The men did it best when they sat back replete after a feast, sipping black coffee and rolling leaf cigarettes. That was when they could talk for hours about everything and nothing, drifting from topic to topic with a sort of divine detachment. But in fact they slid into small talk whenever and wherever they met. It was the right and refined thing to do, even if an urgent purpose burned to be expressed.
3. The Stocking Ghost : Generations have been scared into docility with such threats, involving bogeys ranging from the hantu kopek who stifles noisy children with her pendulous breasts to the grass cutter who uses his scythe to cut off rebellious young heads. From scaring your young to scaring yourself is just one small step. And so perhaps sickings ghost story went round, acquiring depth and lets with each telling as is the way with oral literature.
4. Greetings : "It is un-Malay to be so aware of time," says one scholar. He believes that the British introduced these greetings through the Malay primary schools they set up at the beginning of the century. In this way, the British hoped to instil into the leisurely Malay some of their sense of urgency, their obsession with time.
5. When Wings fly in subtitles : When you see a subtitled foreign films. you have a choice of three courses: follow the files, follow the subtitles, or try to follow both and end up follow ins neither. There are. of course, the giftod few among us whose eve can roll in a fine frenzy from film to subtitles and back to film again without missing a smile or a comes.
6. Spelling - The Method and the madness : A reformist friend deplores my cowardice. Malaysians more than other peoples, says he, should welcome a modern phonetic English spelling. Look, says he, at the way our children write pensel, Disember, klinik, bas and polis in their English exercises. Rather than penalise them for these, we should spearhead the English spelling reform movement and get English written the Ejaan Baru way. Wud it not bi fan, die rides, tu rait Inglisy zis wei sun?
7. The Day Raj Came Back : Cats are so like people, muses the little boy next door as he and I sit by the big drain between our back gardens and watch the evening antics of the neighbourhood felines. Indeed I have always found them as complex and crazy as human beings, as predictable in some ways and as stunningly unpredictable in others.
8. When the city gets you : How does a place like Kuala Lumpur get into your blood? I hated it when I first saw it, but now I do not think I could live anywhere else. I am not exactly in love with Kuala Lumpur. It has not the vibrancy of Penang, the charm of Malacca, the grace of the East Coast. Neither can Kuala Lumpur give me the full feeling of home. Like so many fellow immigrants, home for me is still the little town where I was born and where my folks are. So on those lovely long festival weekends Malaysia is famous for, I join the exodus from the capital city. But move back home to live and work? no. I would miss the noise and bustle, the feeling of things happening and people going places, the very rat race I so often rail against. Above all, I would miss the freedom that comes from not having too many people know who your parents and grandparents were.
9. An alien in my own land : I know enough of the ways of the West Coast to get by. But I have, to my everlasting shame, lived out more than half my life without knowing the other half of my country and people. An ex-student understands immediately when I confess my guilt. "We are just as bad over here, cikgu," he says. "We know very little about your half of the country. “The result is prejudice. You think of the East Coast as a backward back of beyond. We think of the West Coast as a cultural desert."
10. Son of a dog of a dog : Yet, says another friend, we condemn certain acts and attitudes as inhuman and praise others as humane or humanitarian. So we cannot think our species so terrible after all. What is it, then, to be human? To have faults, certainly, as in "I'm only human, you know"; perhaps to be weak rather than wicked; to be capable of getting into a moral mess but not of being cold or cruel in a conscious and calculating way. To be better than this is to be angelic. To be worse is to be beastly, monstrous, and devilish.
- Assorted Hantus(As i was passing II by Adibah Amin)
.
.
I preferred As I was Passing more compared to the second one. This one was okay but it did not have many witty jokes of what was supposed to be ‘Malaysian’ thing, funny descriptions of Adibah Amin’s keen observation of its people and unusual experience encountered in Malaysian Daily Life. The reason i felt this due to this time, most of the things she wrote were coming from her own daughter (her behavior or specifically her generation). Adibah Amin wrote about generational differences that she felt while raising her daughter. I can understand why she has many stories about her daughter but i cant help to feel that i wanted her own stories / anecdotes instead of her daughter’s. Overall, this is still pretty nostalgic yet fun to read what’s life like for Malaysian back in the 70s and 80s. These are some of the anecdotes that i enjoyed with some memorable quotes in it.
1. From Mum to a Modern Miss : And you, I know, can take my ghazal and keroncong and dondang sayang in small doses and do make an effort to share my joy in them, but when the Pesta Dendang Rakyat season is on and you hear nothing else from the TV set and from me, the strain is apt to show.
2. Conversational Expertise : Someone complained the other day that we are losing the art of conversation and I said to myself: thank God. I grew up in a community that revelled in graceful small talk. The women did it beautifully over the traditional betel set, moving from recipes to reputations with exquisite lightness. The men did it best when they sat back replete after a feast, sipping black coffee and rolling leaf cigarettes. That was when they could talk for hours about everything and nothing, drifting from topic to topic with a sort of divine detachment. But in fact they slid into small talk whenever and wherever they met. It was the right and refined thing to do, even if an urgent purpose burned to be expressed.
3. The Stocking Ghost : Generations have been scared into docility with such threats, involving bogeys ranging from the hantu kopek who stifles noisy children with her pendulous breasts to the grass cutter who uses his scythe to cut off rebellious young heads. From scaring your young to scaring yourself is just one small step. And so perhaps sickings ghost story went round, acquiring depth and lets with each telling as is the way with oral literature.
4. Greetings : "It is un-Malay to be so aware of time," says one scholar. He believes that the British introduced these greetings through the Malay primary schools they set up at the beginning of the century. In this way, the British hoped to instil into the leisurely Malay some of their sense of urgency, their obsession with time.
5. When Wings fly in subtitles : When you see a subtitled foreign films. you have a choice of three courses: follow the files, follow the subtitles, or try to follow both and end up follow ins neither. There are. of course, the giftod few among us whose eve can roll in a fine frenzy from film to subtitles and back to film again without missing a smile or a comes.
6. Spelling - The Method and the madness : A reformist friend deplores my cowardice. Malaysians more than other peoples, says he, should welcome a modern phonetic English spelling. Look, says he, at the way our children write pensel, Disember, klinik, bas and polis in their English exercises. Rather than penalise them for these, we should spearhead the English spelling reform movement and get English written the Ejaan Baru way. Wud it not bi fan, die rides, tu rait Inglisy zis wei sun?
7. The Day Raj Came Back : Cats are so like people, muses the little boy next door as he and I sit by the big drain between our back gardens and watch the evening antics of the neighbourhood felines. Indeed I have always found them as complex and crazy as human beings, as predictable in some ways and as stunningly unpredictable in others.
8. When the city gets you : How does a place like Kuala Lumpur get into your blood? I hated it when I first saw it, but now I do not think I could live anywhere else. I am not exactly in love with Kuala Lumpur. It has not the vibrancy of Penang, the charm of Malacca, the grace of the East Coast. Neither can Kuala Lumpur give me the full feeling of home. Like so many fellow immigrants, home for me is still the little town where I was born and where my folks are. So on those lovely long festival weekends Malaysia is famous for, I join the exodus from the capital city. But move back home to live and work? no. I would miss the noise and bustle, the feeling of things happening and people going places, the very rat race I so often rail against. Above all, I would miss the freedom that comes from not having too many people know who your parents and grandparents were.
9. An alien in my own land : I know enough of the ways of the West Coast to get by. But I have, to my everlasting shame, lived out more than half my life without knowing the other half of my country and people. An ex-student understands immediately when I confess my guilt. "We are just as bad over here, cikgu," he says. "We know very little about your half of the country. “The result is prejudice. You think of the East Coast as a backward back of beyond. We think of the West Coast as a cultural desert."
10. Son of a dog of a dog : Yet, says another friend, we condemn certain acts and attitudes as inhuman and praise others as humane or humanitarian. So we cannot think our species so terrible after all. What is it, then, to be human? To have faults, certainly, as in "I'm only human, you know"; perhaps to be weak rather than wicked; to be capable of getting into a moral mess but not of being cold or cruel in a conscious and calculating way. To be better than this is to be angelic. To be worse is to be beastly, monstrous, and devilish.
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