I learned firsthand when my neighbor committed
suicide (the neighbor who inspired my short story “Neighbours” that featured the gossip Mrs. Koh (“Are You Mrs. Koh?”): When someone dies, people will ask how did
they die? When someone commits suicide,
people will tell you why…
While reposting the new link to “Neighbours”, I got to thinking why I wrote the original story, why I chose to focus on
that aspect of the story and not the whole story. I first touched
upon this in an old blog (later published in Tropical
Affairs) that I posted soon after “Neighbors” (using the American spelling)
had been accepted for publication in the American literary journal Thema — twenty years after I first wrote the story for a Malaysian contest. The story, from Lovers and Strangers Revisited, was later taught for six years (2008-2014)
in SPM literature and in various private colleges and universities throughout Malaysia,
and translated into French along with the rest of the collection.
This is the updated version of what I wrote:
Writing, I used to tell my students, is about
making choices. If you choose wisely you
might surprise yourself with the story you end up with. For example in “Neighbors”, I could’ve written
a nonfiction narrative or a different story starting with my hearing some
groans coming from my neighbor’s house, two doors away. When I investigated, I found an elderly
Chinese man lying helpless on the couch.
His door was locked, yet in between moaning he managed to tell me that the
keys were by the sink, which I was able to obtain by reaching through the
grille at the kitchen window. With the help
of another Chinese neighbor (whose wife was pregnant and very upset that he was
getting involved), we took him to the General Hospital.
I could’ve written about the hospital’s reaction
to me, a young white man attending to this elderly Chinese man who was dying,
their giving me strange looks as I wrote in my journal, trying to get all the
details and my impressions while they were still fresh — the writer part of me
at work; and then my anger at the doctors and nurses who seemed indifferent about my
neighbor’s plight. He was dying and no
one wanted to help!
Since the doctors didn’t know what poison he had
taken, I volunteered to go back to his house. Although I often chatted with this neighbor
across the gate or his fence, I had never ventured inside his house. I could’ve written about the eerie feeling I
had wandering inside this empty house where a man had just tried to kill
himself. Upstairs I located two glasses
of beer and some green liquid, which I took to the hospital.
Since this was in the mid-80s before CSI, the
doctors wanted me to go back to the house once more to find out what the green
stuff was. So back I went and eventually
found, hidden behind a partition, a bottle of the weed killer, Paraquat. By then there was nothing the doctors could
do, so I stayed with this man for several hours at the hospital, while we tried, without success, to contact his family. I
didn’t want him to die alone like another expat that I wrote about who had died alone in a faraway land.
I could’ve written about my attending the
three-day Chinese (Teochew) funeral held outside their house, which was very lively
and noisy and attracted a lot of attention from the other Chinese neighbors. When it was over, I was invited back to the
house and given a gift, a token of appreciation for what I had done for this
family.
The family, however, refused to live in the house anymore
because of this suicide. Months later,
another family had moved in, but they kept hearing mysterious noises — like
someone walking around upstairs in the master bedroom — and it was scaring the
children. The family didn’t know about
the suicide until after they had
decided to leave. Malaysians,
particularly the Chinese, take ghosts and spirits very seriously.
None of this mattered to the story that I wanted
to write. For me the story began when I
returned from the hospital to the man’s house and found several neighbors
gossiping.
I was fascinated by all of the comments the
neighbors made, the wild speculations about the family and why the man had
taken his life. Some of the things they
had said were mean and spiteful. Later,
when the man’s wife and daughter returned home, the neighbors quickly dispersed;
they refused to inform them about the man’s death. Even though I was the newest neighbor and an
expat, I had to bear the bad tidings alone.
This was the story that fascinated me. The story I
wanted to tell was not a first person narrative of my finding this man and all
that took place that day (although I could still write about it since it’s in
my journal as either non-fiction or incorporate it into another story or as
part of a novel — it’s all there to be used, grist for the mill as writers often say).
Instead, I chose to write about the neighbors themselves
and what they said about this family in the aftermath of the suicide. In fact ‘Aftermath’ was the original title
when it was first published in Singapore and Australia and in Lovers and Strangers (Heinemann Asia,
1993). Again thanks to my journal, all
the details were there, still fresh, including those that had completely
slipped my memory after several years had already passed, one of the reasons I
urged my writing students to keep a diary/journal.
Another choice I made was to leave me, as a
character, out of the story. I felt it
would be better without a Westerner or a mat
salleh in it. I wanted the dialogue
to be natural, spontaneous, and an expat present would alter the dynamics of
the group, including the dialogue. Also I
wanted to shift the sympathy to this man and his family — even after hearing
many bad things about them.
I purposely wrote the story in a neutral tone with
the viewpoint of an observer, to avoid racial bias, so no one race in this
multi-racial society is talking down to another. Yet, at the same time, all
Malaysians should be able to identify with these characters. They could be your very own neighbor or a
relative, hopefully distant....I wanted to make the story universal, so readers
around the world could relate to the characters and also learn about Malaysia,
where different races freely mix and socialize, and yes, gossip.
When writing your story, whether it is based on a
true dramatic incident or nor, or whether it is fiction or nonfiction, ask
yourself, do you want to write the whole story or just one aspect of that
story? Consider your choices
carefully. I did and thirty years later the
story keeps paying off in unforeseen ways.
Then again, it
is always hard to keep a good story down, especially when it involves a suicide and
neighbors gossiping. At times, we all
love a good gossip. Just ask Mrs. Koh.
# # #
Later I had blogged about the significant changes
that I made in *“Neighbours” that led to its initial publication, and the subsequent
revisions for publications overseas and in various book forms (three publishers
and a French translation), which I noted
in the series The Story Behind the Story,
used by teachers as
an aide for their students. MELTA (Malaysia English Language Teaching Association)
had even created an on-line discussion for “Neighbours” for students and
teachers on their literature forum, which had over 20,500 hits and 30 pages of
comments about the story and Mrs. Koh before it was archived and later take
down.
*The link to the short story “Neighbours” is the revised version, written in the
present tense, after the French translation of Lovers and Strangers Revisited came out.
**Here is link to a recent Google Meet with students at UiTM-Penang during a Q-and-A session about "Neighbours" and the motivation of the various characters and why I ended the story where I did.
