"Neighbours": Comment: Are You Mrs. Koh? by Denis Harry, NST 28/8/10

After meeting the students from SMK (p) Sri Aman Petaling Jeya in KL who were studying my short story "Neighbours" in SPM Literature, you can imagine my surprise when I came across Denis Harry's article  "Comment: Are You Mrs. Koh?"  Denis was writing about my character from "Neighbours"!  It came out nearly one month ago! No one even told me!  I guess it's like that, you figure, oh, he'll see it, or someone else will point it out to him.  When it comes to good news, I'd rather have one hundred people tell me than no one at all!  Now that I know, I feel absolutely delighted, honored,and humbled.  Mrs. Koh, a character I invented twenty years ago, based loosely on one of my neighbors, has just become a stereotype for the busybody gossip in Malaysia!  Please don't be like Mrs. Koh.  Here's the article, in case you missed it:

Comment: Are You Mrs. Koh? by Denis Harry

Neighbours by Robert Raymer is one of the stories from his book, Lovers and Strangers Revisited.

There is a Mrs Koh, the central character in Robert Raymer’s magnificent and well known well-known short story ‘Neighbours’, in every one of us. DENIS HARRY writes why we should be wary of the Mrs Koh type that who is lurking somewhere waiting to pounce on her next promising victim.

STORIES are often inspired by real-life situations, although some elements in them can be fictional. It is not uncommon to go through pages of a novel and be struck by such parallel circumstances which you could relate to. The character George in Mark Haddon's A Spot Of Bother, for example, may remind you of your ageing father at an early stage of dementia. Being able to connect to Joan River's endless struggle in her memoir Enter Talking may reduce others to tears as it did to me.

Dealing with a dimension of miscellany, Neighbours, a fine work by Robert Raymer in Lovers and Strangers Revisited, highlights Mrs Koh as the central character. She fabricates stories to create rifts between neighbours. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Maybe this is because there are many Mrs Kohs in this world, people who really are venomous, vicious and potentially damaging, ready to trample on whoever stands in their way.

Raymer is spot on in creating Mrs Koh's character as she is portrayed as someone we both love and loath at the same time. When you hear her loud voice mentioning someone's name in high decibel, you know she wants your attention and she knows she gets yours.

On the other hand, deep inside your heart you keep praying that she does not talk about you. Whether you want to admit it or not, we all have a certain degree of nosiness. Sensational stories surely catch our alert-as-a-rabbit's ears. Unfortunately, they come with a hefty price tag.

Mrs Koh is someone we would call a nosy parker. Sometimes spelled "nosey parker", this is a person of an overly inquisitive or prying nature. In real life, you can never argue with whatever a Mrs Koh says; she is always right.

In addition to that, she knows everything and wants you to be aware of that too. Here is the sad irony: someone like Mrs Koh may appear warm, friendly and welcoming to those on first encounter with her. Her ability to crack jokes and make fun of other people's flaws and sufferings make her a "people magnet", drawing in audience the moment you anticipate she is going to say her first word.

Let us get real for once: most of us would find it amusing and secretly prefer to see someone trip on a sidewalk than ascend to a great height. It is human nature.

Mrs Koh can be found everywhere: in families, at workplace and -- consciously or not -- in you. At my workplace, these gossip-hungry vultures are dying to be updated on the latest story -- which are sadly true tragedies -- and add their own words, morphing it into a piece of sensational journalism. They somehow find joy spreading stories which, in turn, have profound effects on the people suffering the humiliation.

I can still vividly recall more than 10 years ago a female colleague who suffered from an abusive husband who not only savagely tortured her physically but mentally also. A well-known nosy parker at my workplace found out about it and, because she sat near me at the time, yelled about it at everyone passing by, offering to share the latest and juiciest story ever.

I was shocked and disgusted by her fascination and obsession with other people's sufferings that should never be made public. Within two days, everybody knew about it. My poor colleague, God bless her, faced the crowd with such strength and dignity it put Leslie Cheung to shame.

What about you? Could you be as strong as my colleague when you reach to a juncture where everyone knows the details of your private life? As we are all different, we deal with issues at varying levels of acceptance and tolerance. The mortification that a nosy parker can bring simply cannot be underrated. Many are damaged beyond repair by it. The result of a Mrs Koh's behaviour can sever many ties: friendships, marriages, families and it could possibly cost you your job.

In Neighbours, Mrs Koh hypothesised about Veronica's gambling addiction and its trail of debts that follows ("Every Sunday she plays mahjong and I'm sure she's in debt!"), she triumphantly stated the fact that Mr and Mrs Leong were fighting that morning (She turned to her husband with an I-told-you-so look on her face.) and even dared to cross the line to suggest that Johnny was dead. When her husband denied the latter suggestion, Mrs Koh quickly snapped, "He's as good as dead".

So what can we do to avoid being the next potential victim? The biggest favour you can do yourself is to zip up your mouth and talk only when necessary. God knows how these conniving nosy parkers would turn around and use your words against you in future.

You might praise a co-worker who always donates generously in front of your friends, for example, without realising that there is a pair of ears which should not be there. This pair of ears belongs to an evil individual who can easily twist and claim she heard you saying the person donates because he wants recognition.

Secondly, when life's sadness and bitterness are wearing you down, do not be tempted to confide in someone you barely know although he or she may seem like a sympathetic and trusted good listener no matter how fraught you are. A nosey parker usually has an open face that lures unsuspecting first-time victims. These new victims typically fail to smell a catastrophic future brewing -- a perfect recipe for disaster.

Lastly, don't turn into a Mrs Koh. Turn off the internal switch you consciously realise you have it or not in you permanently. It is a mammoth task if you are used to gossiping but the benefits would outweigh the harm it can bring -- by a million tonnes! Not only will you enjoy healthy relationships at work and home but people would also like you more for they can trust you with their confidences. Unless you are desperate to be as popular as Mrs Koh, why create rifts when there is not much love left in the world?

• Denis Harry is an educator with a great passion for literature and the parallels in our everyday life. Email him at denisharry78@gmail.com

To separate the fact from the fiction, here's the link to The Story Behind the Story of "Neighbours".

*Ohio University is also adapting another story from Lovers and Strangers Revisited, "Home for Hari Raya" into screenplay and film! 

**Update, the 20th anniversary of Lovers and Strangers Revisited

Here are links to some of my author-to-author interviews of first novelists:

Ivy Ngeow author of Cry of the Flying Rhino, winner of the 2016 Proverse Prize.

Golda Mowe author of Iban Dream and Iban Journey.

Preeta Samarasan author of Evening is the Whole Day. 

Chuah Guat Eng,  author of Echoes of Silence and Days of Change. 

Plus:

Five part Maugham and Me series

Beheaded on Road to Nationhood: Sarawak Reclaimed—Part I 

 

Neighbors, A Suicide, and Making Choices or How to Turn Your Story into the Right Story

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 they died… 

After discovering an unpleasant mess with my old website that sent all of my blog links to the story astray (to put it mildly), I re-posted the story and re-linked it to various blogs going back ten years…. While doing so, I got to thinking about “Neighbours”, why I wrote it and 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 wrote 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 then 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.

           

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 form (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.

         —Borneo Expat Writer

*Update, the 20^th anniversary of Lovers and Strangers Revisited

Here are links to some of my author-to-author interviews of first novelists:

Ivy Ngeow author of Cry of the Flying Rhino, winner of the 2016 Proverse Prize.

Golda Mowe author of Iban Dream and Iban Journey.

Preeta Samarasan author of Evening is the Whole Day. 

Chuah Guat Eng,  author of Echoes of Silence and Days of Change. 

Plus:

Five part Maugham and Me series

Beheaded on Road to Nationhood: Sarawak Reclaimed—Part I