Borrowed spaces

Sunday, 16 November, 10:00AM

Church today was a greener, less local affair. On my stroll through its shaded, sun-dappled aisles, I passed by faces familiar and new. I listened to choirs of winged sopranos and spotted-fur tenors. I chose to squat where I might have genuflected, if only to interact with a four-legged, live-in parishioner.

Church today was the 15-hectare Bosque Rodrigues Alves, a cool green oasis in Belém’s otherwise sweltering maze of concrete and gravel. It was the Sunday morning church of choice, it seemed, for several other colleagues of mine and at least one of the Republic of China’s most senior state officials for climate.

A wild Liu Zhenmin (centre), China’s special envoy for climate change, speaking to locals at the Bosque Rodrigues Alves and Botanical Garden of Amazonia in Belém.

Mass commanded no fixed times, but as I traded “bom día”s with the ticket collector at 8:15am, a gaggle of fellow Malaysians were already busy taking photos of the turtles on their morning swim.

Hi, I whispered to the caged animals, watching me reproachfully from behind two layers of fences we had to climb up to greet them. Only the ocelot refused to look us in the eye, swinging woefully on its equally lonely rubber tire. A tiny black owl glared at me, then turned away, and the capuchin monkeys climbed resolutely out of view of my phone camera. The shrines man had built were less for our worship than their torture.

Not all the animals were caged, of course – the large rodents chased each other through the undergrowth around me. When I stopped to look one in the eye, it stared me down defiantly. Was I supposed to have asked permission to trespass on its home? Probably. A 2-real fee paid to a human ticket master is mere theatre to animals and trees. Paper money means nothing to an agouti.

“It’s not polite to stare,” said the agouti, probably.

What have we two-legged, unfeathered beasts to give anyway? On the grand buttress roots of a towering hardwood, a blue macaw stopped its preening to screech at curious onlookers. Let me clean myself in peace, it screamed. The ocelot did much the same, pacing and growling in frustration as a huge, hideous, hairy man mocked it from an infuriatingly safe distance – for the man. And the rodents.

Less space was made for what an ocelot would consider safe.

I wouldn’t have been surprised if they thought we were interrupting their worship, they who live and breathe and nourish this church as it does them. The very cock of their heads, the shuffle of their feet, the slow, deliberate inching of limbs both turtle and sloth – all as good as knees on a pew or heads bowed in prayer.

Ten metres from the park, on the other side of the gated boundary, I am re-assaulted by urban heat. Concrete is a two-faced enemy: sure, the pavements make walking easier and the buildings house lovely air-conditioned spaces for human eating and human shopping, but everything outside it is just…blisteringly hot.

Welcome to the concrete jungle.

I run from the shade of one towering mango tree to the next, and then towards a cafe and bakery that Google Maps tells me is popular and welcoming. It reminds me of the mamaks and kopitiams that churchgoers back home in Kuala Lumpur would throng at midmorning on Sundays.

Nearly everyone here has a cappuccino gelado – which is what I thought would be a simple iced coffee but is in fact a sugar-ladden frappucino. Another colleague and I learnt very belatedly that a cappuccino in Belém does not mean the same thing it does in London or Singapore. Many words do not mean the same thing, but I am certain that there are words in all these different languages that we could learn and use to convey the same meaning.

Saturday, 6 December, 5:00PM

These days I find God in things that live and breathe, like humans, flora, fauna and fungi.  Today, for instance, church is lying on my back in the condominium’s open-air swimming pool, watching the swallows’ white bellies reflect the cool, light blue of the pool tiles, listening to their chittering.

I recognise at least three different types of palm trees in my surroundings. I pause after a lap to gently examine the fractal patterns on a fern growing between the gaps between the pool’s drain cover. Outside the pool, I crouch over a line of fast-moving red ants trekking a crack in the pavement. 

While I swim, I keep my head in the water for longer so that I can identify at the shapes of the leaves scattered across its bottom – they are largely from the frangipani/plumeria/kembojas that have been planted on the perimeters of this condominium’s common areas, all leaning southwards, permanently bent by the occasional hand of the northern winds.

Scraggly little kembojas in bloom.

Tak kenal maka tak cinta – you don’t love what you don’t know – has long been the mantra of Malaysian environmentalists. I’ve been embellishing it for different occasions. Sometimes I add tak kenal maka tak cinta maka tak melabur – you don’t invest in what you don’t love and you don’t know.

But in the natural world, my time and presence is the investment. So I add a different embellishment: kalau nak kenal, kenallah namanya – if you want to know them, then know their names.

I realise I know at least three names for some of these trees in my backyard – English, Malay, Latin – the way I know my own name in three languages – English, Mandarin, Cantonese. How many names of the same being do I need to learn to be able to lay claim to love? And how many other non-verbal ways must I exhibit to prove that love?

This habit of three-name-calling is not something I came up with. I increasingly see other Malaysian women doing it, too – in guide books and out loud when they lead us through the hallowed groves they call home.

Perdana Botanical Gardens. Rimbun Dahan. Pulai Trail. Bukit Dinding. Syu, Angela, Carolyn, Inci. There’s also Syarifah Nadhirah’s illustrated book, Recalling Forgotten Tastes, which I recently picked up a copy of at Kuala Lumpur’s only dedicated nature bookstore, Sunda Shelves.

Native Malaysian plant names in Temiar or Semai, Latin and Malay.

In the churches of the natural world, the saints go by names familiar and new. We say them in quick succession, with relative measures of reverence: Pope Francis, Jane Goodall, Chico Mendes, etc.

At times, I am reminded that there is no separating the God of Catholicism from the Earth on which His churches are built. In the freezing cold of the COP30 media centre, fellow Climate Change Media Partnership reporter Ponje asks me what laudato si’ means. The long-rusty Sunday School teacher part of my brain creaked very slowly into motion…too slowly. 

“Um,” I say, “it’s Pope Francis’…what’s the word?” The word was “encyclical” – a term too far buried in the dusty, unopened-Bible corners of my mind. I remember more clearly explaining Mikhail Gorbachev to 14-year-old Catholic children than I remember the teachings of the Laudato Si’.

The full title of the encyclical includes the words “care for our common home” – a home that includes other people by nature. “Loving people is how we love Jesus,” an artist wrote into a comic strip I read recently, which was about the people who go and do not go to church. It made me think about the still-church-going friends I know who see each other much more often than I see any of them, considering how rarely I ever step into cathedrals built of brick, stone and concrete anymore.

After all, the people I’ve chosen to love are outside them.

Tuesday, 22 December, 9:00AM

I have been told more than once that I am not a naturally loving person. It is in my nature to tend towards being antisocial, narcissistic, and the kind of utility-maximising asshole you read about in economics textbooks. This is why the Adam Smith quote I keep top of mind has nothing to do with free markets or the invisible hand – it is the one he opens The Theory of Moral Sentiments with: 

“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”

“The pleasure of seeing it” is also how I would describe the moments I experience when I pay attention to the non-human natural world. One evening in Belém, a caipirinha in hand, I stared with delight at a towering mango tree growing just outside the fence of the COP30 gastronomic centre. 

O mango tree, o mango tree.

Like many of its kin in this City of Mango Trees, it so ginormous that it hosts the most magnificent ferns – and even then, I know these pale in comparison to the size of flora growing just a few kilometres from us, on the outer edge of the Brazilian Amazon. 

In an Instagram story of a former American climate negotiator I follow, she held in her hand a putat-like flower similar to those I’d seen scattered around the Bosque Rodrigues Alvez – yet the one she held was larger than her fist, a bloom nearly as big as a face. The ones I’d seen could barely cover my palm.

Weeks later, in a gated neighbourhood on the edge of Subang Jaya, I stifle curses at the city council’s contractors for having lopped the tops off our own mango trees, growing defiantly from cracks in our drains. The leaves of a giant staghorn fern, nearly as big as the one I saw in Belém, are strewed across one of the last patches of public grass left in this neighbourhood. 

The other patches have been destroyed with cement, poured by errant neighbours more interested in claiming parking territory for their new electric BMWs and their ilk. 

I wonder, when these neighbours see how much flood-related loss and damage their further neighbours in Sumatra have suffered, do they regret their actions? Do they connect the dots? Or do they think there should be more concrete drains and more tree cutting, and that there was no use for the good soil and mud they pay the city council taxes to maintain?

We all have bad hair days, but sometimes it is literally the hairdresser’s fault.

When I first grew disillusioned with Catholicism at age 16, the parents and friends I sought comfort from advised me to “pray more” and “spend more time in church”. At least one person referenced St John of the Cross’ “dark night of the soul” and I’ve lost count of how many times I’d heard the words “spiritual wilderness”.

In the real world, the wilderness is less spiritual than it is an inescapable, physical reality. No amount of prayer and glistening tabernacles can drown out the roar of engines and the screech of Light Rapid Transit carriages. It is the unceasing rumble of gas-driven infrastructure that frightens even the boldest of wildlife; I strain to hear the pigeons and their docile, soothingly low-pitched coos.

Sarawakian artist M. Sahzny produced a tender plea against the mis-charecterisation of pigeons as pests; I urge you to watch it.

But having been born and raised in the lush abundance of the tropics, to pretend that a desert-like wilderness is normal is to do the God of this earth too great a disservice. 

How can I turn away from the birdsong of sunbirds and starlings and zebra doves that stream through my window each morning? How can I ignore all the delightful familiarity and newness that the sight of a great kiskadee carries when I spot it on the wire-strewn, mango-treed streets of Belém?

Looks like a cross between an oriole and a bulbul, but it’s actually a great kiskadee captured using the inadequate zoom function of an iPhone 12 camera.

My employer once described her environmental consciousness as having been shaped by the aerial sight of Canada’s black tar sands. It makes me wonder what kinds of words St John of the Cross would have used to describe such a scene. Fewer people quote Jessica Cheam about black tar sands though, because maybe the reality of them is all too confronting to be literary about.

Or maybe, and I write this with a great and potentially misguided hope, we are too busy looking for different kinds of altars to lavish our attention on.

It is beauty, it is grace, it will screech right in your face.

I am blessed not just to be able to spend time in so many different churches, but to have the time to read and reflect and write about them, too. And I am infinitely fortunate to have learnt from and been inspired by writers much more sensitive and wise than I am.

Thank you for reading. If you’re looking for far more wonderful reflections on nature and spirituality from other parts of the world, read:

This is not a eulogy

I struggled to decide whether writing this was even appropriate. My mother in life preferred privacy and the comfort of few people, and her death is no reason to change that. I held off sharing details of her obituary on social media out of respect for what she might’ve wanted, but also for selfish reasons – there were only so many people I wanted to greet and hug and reply the texts of and speak to.

Even then, the days – and now weeks – following her death have largely been a haze of tearless activity. I didn’t so much stave off the tears as I did cry them all while she was still alive, in the months leading up to her slow decline in health and then her exponential dive off what felt like a cliff’s edge. [All this is figuratively speaking, of course, my mother in life was terrified of heights and wouldn’t have done any such jumping.] I have found it more sensible to grieve early, at the prospect of losing the people you love while they are still alive, and then to do something about it instead of crying tears of regret.

But my choice to remain silent and deny myself the catharsis of sharing my writing with no-backsies opened up an a strange hollow into which guilt crept. Doubt and fear nestled themselves in my hands, then tied ribbons around my fingers as I sat distracted and unwitting. They strung me along like a puppet, one that would go back to work and conduct her interviews, drive around and eat full meals like a normal person with spectacular coping mechanisms.

That was bullshit, of course, and I didn’t have to wait long for my body to tell me so by way of violent vomiting and recurring brain fog. I would’ve kept silent for longer and refrained from publishing anything if it wasn’t for the intense discomfort I derived from not writing. I might be my mother’s daughter but I am also my father’s, and like my father, I am predisposed to endless storytelling. I wanted to announce my mother’s death for the selfish reason of wanting to be able to grieve publicly, to justify my silence in places (mostly Instagram) where I’ve been historically noisy, to verbalise an excuse for ignoring people who expected responses from me.

I have drawn on the strength and comfort and patience of the many women I know and cherish since my mother’s death – my friends, my employers, my family – but it is the work of two other women, one also dead, the other still breathing and both complete strangers, that have pushed me to write and publish my hideous truths in long, run-on sentences that defy the fickle rules of our current overlords: social media algorithms. “Write from the belly,” wrote poet and author Joy Sullivan in a post on her best writing advice. “Write what you (wish you didn’t) know,” she said, and so I did:

The industry I work in often encourages speaking or writing “truth to power”, but I don’t know if there is any real power to this truth: that I am ashamed of my how unproductive I’ve been and the pathetic quality of my paid work over the past few days, that I feel the need to hide what I really think and feel, that my words and stories are as much ugly noise as the next person’s. I am ashamed of my own anger, and ashamed of my silence. I am ashamed that I have been silent on the subject of my mother’s death in my wider social circle, although I know that if I were to have posted or tried in any way to have rehashed the eulogy I delivered at her funeral, I would also feel a nagging guilt or regret at being so public about it. [February 6, 2024]

Maybe that guilt will win one day by eating me alive, but these days are not it. I have gained too much from the raw, unfiltered words that writers before me have birthed from the depths of their own grief to deny myself the opportunity to follow after them like an entranced puppy. In the silent gaps of time that punctuated the chaos of a 12-hour-day wake, talking to family and friends, writing my mother’s eulogy and preparing for her funeral, an early line from the stage adaptation of the late Joan Didion’s A Year of Magical Thinking filled my thoughts like a mantra: “The details will be different, but it will happen to you.” The details, I thought, were almost laughably serendipitous – the day my mother died, the person who’d made it possible for me to access Didion’s work had reached out, an odd coincidence given the long months we go without ever communicating.

That was just one among many small, quiet moments of outlandish delight in the days and weeks surrounding my mother’s death. These were moments my self-disgust has tried and failed to smother: my ruthless passing of gasses during my mother’s funeral that made me giggle uncontrollably; the noisy minutes I spent in conversation with her by what would soon become her deathbed, updating her on the results of the Australian Open and listening to her translate the Tamil conversation between the other patient and her daughter; laughing about the use of purple cabbage in bouquets of condolences; continuing to babble words of love but also nonsensical stories based off of childhood memories while holding my mother’s hand, watching her breathe her last.

Maybe one day I will find it in me to be ashamed for the tender joy I found in the hours other people gave me to grieve, but I hope I never will. It is precisely because the details were different in my mother’s almost four-year battle with breast cancer that the words that I use to describe and remember them by are different, too.

One such occasion on which I was repeating that line in my head was a bright and sunny day between my mother’s death and her funeral. I was driving along a route which I’d recently learnt was a common spot for accidents – going too too fast along the bend in the road often sent cars swerving into the nearby trees and foliage, and on brighter days like that one, you could see skid marks left by such unskilled drivers.

I’ve thought about describing the passing of time since her death as skid marks, left behind by a what feels like a collision that forced our lives to a screeching halt. We’ve since towed most of the remains of that tragedy away, leaving only visual scars of burnt rubber on a road that the rest of the city races over in their hurry to get to work, or the mall, or the latest IG-worthy space that opened up across town.

In the grand scheme of things, the skid marks are simply a temporary blight on the face of a road that will soon be worn down and repaved. They’ve slowed no one else down. But it is having had my mother with me on that journey up until that point, and not beyond it, that makes them last a little longer in my head.

The Lawbreakers Who Fed Me

My denim-covered ass has been on nearly every sit-able space in the Kuala Lumpur International Airport departure hall – the floor, foot railings by the massive glass window walls, well-worn seats in rows near the toilets, and grimy melamine chairs of fast-food chains. It’s been four hours of waiting.

“Are they here yet?” I ask my friend Jerng for what feels like the hundredth time.

“I don’t know,” he says.

We both crane our necks towards the glass gates, watching cars and taxis whizz by the drop-off point beyond. It’s futile, we know, but we’re not here for anything else.

About twenty feet away, two other men pace restlessly, staring towards the same, uninteresting roads.

Eight months before this, Jerng and his employee Sara* were arrested. It was the peak of the second Movement Control Order in Malaysia, when residents were prohibited from dining in at restaurants and not allowed to travel more than 10 km from their homes. 

On that fateful evening, Sara, a foreign national, was manning the restaurant herself as she’d been trained to do. Law enforcement showed up to spot check log books and ensure temperature checks were being made on patrons. Unfortunately, further questioning revealed that Sara had overstayed her visa, making her an illegal immigrant in the country.

That was in October 2020. Her hearing in the magistrate court, scheduled for weeks later, was postponed indefinitely.

In the months that followed, Jerng tracked her whereabouts from one cell to the next, driving to half a dozen locations and only managing to meet her face-to-face once, at her hearing in April 2021. Having had no contact with family members, who were deathly worried about her, and no access to legal representation, Sara appeared anxious, Jerng said. He’d become her main contact point with the outside world, including her husband who was still in Malaysia. Jerng followed up on her court dates, rapidly familiarising himself with the law (and lack thereof) surrounding illegal immigrants.

But Sara’s prospects were bleak. While Jerng was bailed out of prison by a generous friend and charged a slap-on-the-wrist fine, Sara would likely continue to be locked up by the immigration department no matter how much bail we were willing to pay. A deportation was the best-case scenario. The worst was that she would continue to face infinite jail time in Malaysia’s notoriously cramped and squalid immigration detention centres.

Before we go any further, a warning: this story does not have a happy ending.

I spent much of last month reading up on Malaysia’s immigration policies for different reasons entirely – I was working on an article about forced labour for a news portal. (Read it here.) What I learnt shouldn’t have surprised me: the Malaysian immigration process and regulations surrounding low- and semi-skilled migrant workers, to put it bluntly, sucks.

 Under the necessary Visit Pass (Temporary Employment) (details in basic graphics below), workers are not allowed to leave their employers for the duration of their visa, or to change employment sectors. Many, and I quote Labour Law Reform Coalition co-chairperson Irene Xavier, with whom I reached out to for the article, face what’s called Hobson’s choice or the illusion of free choice: stay with abusive employers or invalidate your visa.

Click on the right arrow to view all three infographic slides

Most recent cases of forced labour highlight large, exporting companies in Malaysia’s manufacturing sector. It’s easier to hold big international brands accountable for injustices in their supply chains, which is what migrant workers’ activist Andy Hall has been striving to do in addition to filing complaints with agencies like the US Customs and Border Protection. Other domestically-focused sectors in Malaysia that employ migrant workers, such as construction and services, are subject to less scrutiny.

But many of these migrant workers are also deliberate illegal immigrants, choosing to overstay their visas or entering the country on tourist visas as spouses or relatives of legal workers. According to the World Bank, they seek employment, which is well beyond the rights of their visa, and overstay their legal limits.

Sara was one of them.

After six hours of waiting at the airport, I spy several uniformed men leaping off the back of what looks like a military truck. They’re wearing uniforms that resemble those of Malaysian firefighters, but only as far as the pattern goes – these ones are a hideous combination of wilted brinjal and murky grey.

“Jerng, is that them?”

“It could be.”

We get off the floor and hurry towards the glass doors. Imigresen? Jerng asks the officers.  Ye. They have a brief conversation, from which we learn that the detainees scheduled for deportation today would be arriving “soon”.

A tense half an hour later, a larger, more menacing looking truck pulls up over twenty metres away. By the time we’ve managed to get close enough to see what’s happening, the officers from said truck have already organised about a dozen detainees into two rows and ordered them to squat. Gleaming metal handcuffs bind one of each wrist to that of another prisoner. More than half of the group are women, the others men.

I flinch inside. There is something grossly dehumanising about being ordered to sit outside the air-conditioned hall, cuffed to another person. I imagine it’s to ensure they don’t run away but scared and shackled, the detainees are deathly still, even among themselves. Their eyes are wide with apprehension. 

“Where is she?” I whisper to Jerng, seconds before he waves at someone in the line. I raise my hand in a wave, too. We’ve spotted Sara, looking gaunter than I remember and more terrified than I’ve ever seen. A brief expression of relief crosses her face when she recognises us.

Jerng approaches the officers with his typical but unnerving bravado, and I totter cautiously behind him. He asks for permission to hand Sara the bag of clothes and essentials that we’ve packed, and one of the officers nods, but orders him to reveal its contents first. Jerng complies, giving a summary of the items in stilted Bahasa, which he later repeats to Sara.

I tell her that we’ve included sanitary pads and toiletries, as well as dates, biscuits and drinking water to share with her fellow detainees. It’s Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting. They’ll probably be hundreds of feet up in the air when the azan sounds, signalling the breaking of fast for the day. I wonder what conditions have been like for them in the detention camp, and whether or not they’ve been able to observe puasa there. I wonder if the women have even had access to basic feminine products. But there is no opportunity to ask – the immigration officers watch over us like hawks, eyes narrowing at every spoken word.

Suddenly, an officer raises his voice at one of the other visitors, a man who appears to be trying to tell family members on the phone that his imprisoned sister is in front of him, that he sees her, that she’s okay. “Jangan guna telefon!” the officer says, loudly and sternly enough for passersby to gawk. We all back away. “Letak sekarang!”

The other uniformed guards wave us off, seeing that we’ve completed our handover of goods. They are stern but not, as far as I can tell, unkind. After all, they’re just doing their jobs. I’ve pissed off numerous people just doing my job as a journalist before.

Sara manages best as she can with the backpack while struggling to stand up, all while being handcuffed to another lady. The other detainee is helpful, pulling the bag straps higher on Sara’s shoulders. Tears form in the corner of her tired eyes. “Thank you,” Sara says, even as we are being separated. I nod and smile, trying to mask my helplessness. “Thank you for coming.” Jerng has told her that he’s in touch with her husband, who’ll be waiting for her call once she’s landed back home.

Then the immigration officers herd them along, and they disappear.

Even after weeks of researching and a constant stream of WhatsApp links, I’m convinced that I’ve barely seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to issues surrounding migrant workers and forced labour in Malaysia. 

It’s oxymoronic though, because just outside my bedroom window, migrant workers have been demolishing my neighbour’s house and constructing a neat first-storey patio. They live in that half-built house, and I know this because there is no back wall to the room they sleep in. In the daytime, they sit on the edge of the semi-constructed patio during their breaks, scrolling on their phones and eating tapau-ed food. At night, they chat with each other at the front of the house, which I pass by on my regular walks, and doze on mattresses on the floor in that open room. Their sarongs are hung to dry from one of the still-intact windows.

Their presence, like that of most migrant workers in this country, is a boon. Low- and semi-skilled migrant workers, many from Bangladesh and Nepal, keep Malaysia’s factories churning high quality, internationally-demanded goods. They’re the ones who put roofs over our heads in the construction industry, and who fill the counters and kitchens of our many restaurants, never mind their legal status. We owe them more than we know, and often far more than they’re getting paid.

But labour isn’t often fairly valued, not in this economic system. Milton Friedman famously argued that business has only one social responsibility – to make profits, so long as it stays within the rules of the game. Here in Malaysia, the rules surrounding migrant workers are either barely enforced or can be overlooked with the right amount of palm greasing.

Not many migrant workers, legal or illegal, are fortunate enough to work relatively stable shifts in a relatively safe environment the way Sara was. In a recent Channel 4 exclusive on Dyson supplier ATA IMS, a video (though not independently verified) showed workers scrambling dangerously to escape what they thought were the police.

The emotional, physical and overall human costs are horrendous, even if it isn’t reflected on corporate balance sheets. In my three years of knowing Sara, she had been quiet but hardworking and friendly, always offering a smile whenever I saw her and regularly working with her colleagues to plate my basic orders as artfully as possible.

In the eyes of the law, she may have earned her deportation. That doesn’t make the consequences of a patchy legal and enforcement system any more painful.

Sara’s university-aged daughter stopped eating after learning her mother was arrested. She fell dangerously ill as the months wore on with little news of her mother’s fate.

 Within days after Sara’s return home, her daughter passed away.

*Name changed for privacy.

Reality: A Two-Part Series

I.

Reality is this:
That on the other side of the hill,
Big money slaughtered and killed
And desecrated
The once lush land of our fathers

And all we men barely stop to stare
Before running along like ants
On fallen tree trunks

II.

Reality is also this:
That in the thick jungle of uncertain times,
A few small steps and helping hands
With grit and perseverance
Will buy you slivers of necessary peace

So find peace with the ways of the world
For the sake of the Earth;
Let her not bargain in vain.