Trengganu is no Dark City

Two local books came into my possession recently. One is Dark City 2, the sequel to Xeus’s Dark City which had garnered much praise in the media last year. I have four contributor’s copies in my possession for my story, Hin’s Moment of Truth. This story was first written for my writing correspondence course several years back. The assignment was to write a short story with a surprise ending. The tutor thought it was a good effort but alas I couldn’t find a suitable publication for the story.

One day I was going through my bank of unpublished and unfinished stories in my computer when a thought struck me. Am I such a lousy story writer that I have difficulty find homes for my fiction? I pulled out Hin’s Moment of Truth and emailed it to Xeus. Hey, I like the story, she said but you need to expand it. I reworked the story according to her suggestions. And I must say she’s a very good conceptual editor.

I read Dark City 2 in three hours. Most of the stories are exciting and unpredictable in their own way but two of my favourites are Xeus’s Signature Spa and Chua Kok Yee’s The Penalty. It so happened that my 16 year-old like these two stories too. (Don’t you like mine? I asked. Yeah, but I’ve read your story before, so it didn’t count, she said.)

In the Signature Spa, the protagonist, Gaia got her just desserts while enjoying her ‘Heavenly Spa’ treatment. In The Penalty, we empathize with Ah Tiong who got into trouble with the loan sharks when he lost his football bets. The ending came as a surprise as I had expected another twisty scenario.

Tunku Halim’s Hawker Man is a pulsating read but the ending is rather macabre. Cain Rashchall’s Maid to Order is quite risque and may score with male readers.

Growing Up in Trengganu by Awang Goneng (AG) is a blook or a book which had its origins as a blog. For the uninformed, AG is the other half of popular blogger Kak Teh. She kindly arranged to send me a copy of the book to review. I have read some of AG’s blog entries and was impressed with his writing skill.

GUIT brims with the rich sights and sounds of the Trengganu where AG grew up. The details in the book are amazing. AG has an elephant’s memory, aided surely with studious journaling. Read for yourself this excerpt where he recalled his mother making agar-agar.

When the mixture was to the desired viscosity, she poured the fluid in as many trays as she could pull from the kitchen cupboard… and into any other tray-like things that’d serve her purpose. These being mainly old Huntley & Palmer biscuit tins, food-trays painted with a smiling Nyonya extolling the virtues of some local tea, or the lids of any old containers that could hold her gelatinuous stuff in sufficient depth and quantity.

He went on to narrate how his mother cut the colourful agar-agar into inch-long diamond shapes and put them out to dry in trays placed on the corrugated iron rooftop of the neighbouring surau (they lived in a tall house that overlooked the surau). But when the geduk, a massive drum of cow hide, was beaten to signal the call to prayer, the vibration shook the rafters so much that it sent the trays tumbling and the agar-agar raining down on the earth.

AG has a sense of humour too, though his sister might beg to differ.

“… I used to catch a gecko lizard in my palm before shaking my sister’s hand, and seeing it jump out of her hand as she screamed and screamed was more delightful than seeing it dead.”

GUIT is peopled with folk such as Ah Chin the tailor with his favourite one-liner, “Tak boleh yankee-la” (yankee means figure-hugging as in drainpipe pants), Pok Mud the retired prison warder who laced prisoners’ food with the laxative fruits of a palm tree and a distant uncle who didn’t bat an eyelid when technicoloured agar-agar rained from the surau rooftop.

As the blurb on the backjacket says, “Sultans, sweetmeat sellers and shopkeepers all act as springboards as you meander through Trengganu history, and by the end of this book you will have painlessly mastered the ‘Trengganuspeak’ that foils even fellow Malaysians.”

Well said indeed. I can’t help envying AG his glorious kampung childhood so resplendent with memories.

If Dark City 2 is like fast food, to be devoured quickly in a single sitting, then Growing Up in Trengganu is akin to a Chinese dinner, to be slowly savoured in between sips of Chinese tea.

However, I wish that GUIT had bigger fonts that are kinder to near-sighted eyes and that the contents weren’t all crammed in so much.  Some empty space in between chapters or sections would have provided some relief to the eyes.