Everything

“In the beginning were words. But not the sort of words you might expect.” – Amir Muhammad , Once Again – Trash, Our Trash Generation: A Collection of Contemporary Malaysian Ideas (1997) I don’t remember a world without language. Always, language and imagination, speculation, utters of sound. Words, beginning of words. What would I be without language? My existence has been determined by language, not only the spoken but the unspoken, the language of speech and the language of motion. My childhood was the oral tradition of Melayu people – which included my immediate family of one elder sister, one younger brother, one youngest sister, my father and mother. My world was the world of several places in memory; Changlun and Yan (Kedah), Lenggong (Perak), Jalan Pekeliling, Sungai Besi and currently it is Taman Tun Dr. Ismail (Kuala Lumpur). The years when I was an offspring (baby to 12-year old), I grew up within a people who didn’t get well with education, including my...

Hospital. This is a place where no-one can ignore reality, where life presents itself as a vision of all that is monstrous, unfair and inhuman. Well, some people think that. Once a hospital was to medicine as the cathedral to religion and the palace to monarchy. It is the heart of the enterprise, the site where medicine was practiced at its most advanced, specialized, innovative, complex and costly. In the developed world, I mean nowadays, hospitals claim the lion's share of the medical budget. Which to me, is a good thing. I've always seen a hospital as a place where a hush hangs over the endless corridors and swinging doors. The rooms where night and day are an irrelevance. Artificial low light maintains a clinical 24-hour world. Beds, patients swathed in tubes, oxygen masks, wires. Machines whirring, clicking, beeping. There was one time, I visited my auntie in the hospital where beside my auntie laying a girl, and which I got cognizant of ...

What did you have for dinner? I cooked kuey teow. Awesome. Eh, I have a question for you. Do you like mee? The yellow mee? Nope. I would prefer mee hoon and kuey teow instead of that yellow noodles. Why? Same with me. I despise that yellow mee. That's the last thing I would eat. Kan? It tastes funny. With all that bitter and plastic smell. I think it only tastes good with chicken curry. Other than that, it tastes yucky! How about poultry and fish? Which one do you prefer? Fish! This time tak sama. *laughing Fish is good for health. For me it's not. It contains a lot of proteins. Too much proteins means too much uric acid precipitation. Same with other seafood, fish is considered as one of the trigger foods for Arthritis. A joint disorder that involves inflammation of one or more joints. Macam gout. I once read that fish is not included as one of the sources of inflammation. I believe fish is better compared to chicke...