This is actually a short story I wrote myself for a competition and decided it would be useful for changing-self. You are allowed to use your own compositions as extra texts. Be careful though, they do have to sound legitimate. If you decide to use it please notify me via the comments box in the home page.
Story first, analyses later.
YL Ooi
The motorcycle rested on the cement porch outside our house. My child’s memories tell me it’s a Suzuki, painted with bright red and white against shining steel and black leather. I was never allowed on it, but in my dreams, I have clutched to my grandfather’s hard waist as we sped over the bridge and back, along the roads to his rubber plantations.
Fancies blur into reality.
For a brief year, I had begun to remember with a child’s mind for detail, the open absorption of everything. There was comfort in those calloused, sun-browned hands that gripped my tiny fingers, safety in the clinging smell of thick smoke from wood and tobacco and sometimes milky rubber juices. Something in the old face etched with pain and triumphs never permitted me to whimper my tiredness as I trailed him, with his stocky, swinging gait like a sailor’s after a long time at sea. The cloudy dark eyes had begun to dilute into a pale blue at the edges, and sometimes, when the incense of our prayer sticks seeped into them, became lined with tendrils of blood.
There is a haze amidst these memories.
Everything changed with a sudden, overwhelming sharpness. The days of warm familiarity were thrust into oblivion when I arrived in Australia, on a numbing winter’s day that was sleeting and dull-grey as my mood. I can almost see myself, bloated in layers of jackets and face buried in thick, woolen scarves. The eyes stared as if somewhere in the vast columns of parked cars and steel trolleys, there might be a promise of warm familiarity.
At that point, I struggled to understand. I have tried to understand everything since. I worship knowledge, because there, you can find secrets and logical explanations to life’s vexing puzzles.
I hated the world of the child. No-one ever thought you could understand because you lived in the down-there world where adults had to kneel and explain things in that nice, put-on voice. And anytime they got tired of trying to explain, they just stood up and went on in their up-there world. I grew fast, trying to reach the world of understanding and when I got there, I finally realised there were never any answers in the first place.
It was all like a game. Life is a game. You learn the rules and then twist them to suit yourself. And you chase life, rationalising everything, so confident you have every loophole covered.
I learnt the rules, I adapted and survived. I pushed away the old dialects and distinct lives of the old men of Kulim and immersed myself into a new life. I joined the masses of people grouped in friendships that seemed to provide security, yet told each other lies and pretended to enjoy things they never really enjoyed. I studied and I read everything, absorbing a new type of knowledge to replace the old stories about traditions that I was no longer a part of.
I stand at the airport now and even after all these years, I remember the warm tropics and thundering storms of Malaysia. There, in my mind, is the sleepy village of Kulim hung with pelts of rubber and fragrant hawker stands. They are a world apart, innocent in their own kind of glittering exoticism. In half an hour I will be there, arriving to stroll the cracked tarred roads and rickety wooden houses and lingering smoke.
My mind absorbs everything. I have trained it to. And then it is neatly categorised and logically sorted, all in seconds and subconsciously, like a well-worn habit of storing away files so that when I need them, I can just pull them out. I think about what I will say to my grandfather along the way. A grandfather I have not seen for a decade. Ten years...as though I’m old already.
He is shorter than I remember (I’m told that happens when you grow). The heavyset build is still hard with muscle and evidently powerful as we hug each other fiercely. I can rest my head over his shoulder for the first time and feel the grey stubble rub my soft cheek. The motorcycle was sold years ago, when he grew too old to ride it. We enter the house together. He asks me softly in the lilting dialect how I am.
I fumble.
My mind is forced to search archives and takes several moments to recall that this used to be my mother-tongue. A chasm divides us, a ravine whose bridges have been pulled and broken as we moved in our separate lives.
Tears form.
At this point, I make so many discoveries that I cannot understand. There is a new awareness, of emotions, and of things that cannot be put into words of any kind. I wish I had learnt about them earlier.
There is a sudden regret at what could have been, but never was. He takes my hand and I can see the silent comprehension in his aged eyes that tells me I don’t need spoken words to communicate.
Knowledge never explains why you love someone, or feel warmth when you look at a photo of them.
The short story, Discovering, by YL Ooi, explores the notion of “Changing-Self” through a persona who has migrated as a child and how this migration has affected the persona’s relationship with her grandfather. The use of first person narrative voice renders reported events more personal and suggests the story is a piece of personal reflection, written at a particular time to record the changes that have occurred in the persona’s life.
The first change this text deals with is the persona’s migration from the small, “sleepy village of Kulim” in Malaysia to Australia. “Everything changed with a sudden, overwhelming sharpness.” The language of the reflection is not that of a young child, but an adult. The word “Everything”, combined with the adjectives, “sudden, overwhelming”, however, evokes the sense of totality in a child’s perspective. The use of such language allows a more precise communication of ideas, without detracting too much from how the child would have viewed such changes in her life.
The environment, culture, and society of these two countries is juxtaposed to highlight the extent of the changes surrounding the child, for example, “warm familiarity...numbing winter’s day”, and “rubber plantations” as opposed to “steel trolleys”. Change is forced upon the persona, who as a child, tries to adapt. “I studied and I read everything, absorbing a new type of knowledge to replace the old stories about traditions that I was no longer part of.” Ooi suggests that the persona, in being dislocated from cultural traditions, has changed what they would have valued by using knowledge as a replacement. The use of the words “no longer” evokes a sense of loss, overlaying the present reflection onto past actions.
The second part of the short story switches to present tense as the persona revisits Malaysia after a decade. The blend of past and present tenses throughout this story allows the responder to more easily perceive the changes within the persona’s life. Ooi employs dramatic irony, as the responder realises what the persona’s naivety prevents her from doing – that changes have occurred during the ten-year separation between the persona and her grandfather. Short sentences in isolated paragraphs are used to emphasise the emotional impact the discovery of these changes have on the persona, for example, “I fumble.” and “Tears form.”
The similarity of two sentences, one in earlier reflection, and one in the present, prompt the responder to make connections, emphasising how the persona’s way of thinking has changed.
“At that point, I struggled to understand.”
“At this point, I make so many discoveries that I cannot understand.”
Despite the persona’s pursuing of knowledge as a way of understanding events in her own life, she finally discovers “things that cannot be put into words of any kind.” This latest realisation or change is communicated positively. Ooi shows the responder how language and cultural barriers are broken down, not through knowledge, but love, “I don’t need spoken words to communicate.” The composer offers the responder the opportunity of “Discovering”, as the text’s title suggests, deeper meanings within life that involve certain changes or discoveries such as its conclusion “Knowledge never explains why you love someone, or feel warmth when you look a photo of them.”
