Sunday February 17, 2008
The beauty of ordinary lives
By ELAINE DONG
The women featured on the pages of Gilding the Lily live lives of quiet bravado and resilience that need no adornment to shine.
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In a cacophony of girlish chatter, 16-year-old Ho Lee Ching immerses herself in the camaraderie and friendship of her classmates. Looking at her, you can see the shadow of a difficult childhood, one laced with ridicule and judgement. She suffers from Tourette’s Syndrome but the rare disease remained undiagnosed for 12 tormented years as she grew up in a town in Selangor. Today, she is an A student who aspires to be a dancer, for in dance, her imperfections melt away and she is free.
In quiet Kuala Dungun, Terengganu, a gutsy lady mans the cashier’s desk at Hollywood Photo Studios. With two grown children from an arranged marriage, Poh Seng Hwa is happy with her lot in life. She sits facing the main street every day, chatting with the patrons and friends she has gathered over the years. Not a Hollywood happy ending, but a happy ending nonetheless.
These are three snippets out of 65, all on Malaysian women, as seen through the eyes of writer Liew Suet Fun and photographer S.C. Shekar in their book, Gilding The Lily.
When my editor gives me the book to “see what we can get out of it”, I am sceptical because at first glance, it looks like a typical coffee table book that is all form and no substance.
Yes, the book is very well written and the photography superb, are my first careful comments. The writing style is effortless, and then I find myself finishing the 224-page book in a matter of hours.
Some stories are entertaining, some sad, some inspiring, but all are supposed to showcase Malaysian women as they are. This is, after all, a project initiated by Women, Family, and Community Development Minister Datuk Seri Shahrizat Abdul Jalil. (See ‘Myanmar to Malaysia’ opposite on how the project came about.)
In the book’s foreword, Shahrizat states, “this book is not an attempt to define the Malaysian Woman”. But my thought is: if you put a book like this out there, surely that is exactly what it does?
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Shekar and writer Liew Suet Fun wanted to show ‘what makes Malaysian women what they are’. – RAYMOND OOI / The Star |
“People tend to think KL is Malaysia,” says Shekar, 46. “So it would follow from that the women in KL are representative of women in the whole of Malaysia. But they’re not! Approximately 90% of women in this country live outside KL. More than 80% of the women in this country are not in high flying jobs.”
The official figures seem to bear him out: According to the Department of Statistics, a 2006 survey shows women living in KL make up about 6% of women in Malaysia. And a 2005 survey found that only about 12% of all women in the workforce are in professional and managerial positions. The rest are trade, service, and clerical workers, technicians or are in other elementary occupations. (From kpwkm.gov.my/bm/statistic.asp.)
Documenting values, changes
“In doing this story,” says Liew, 48, “we tried to focus on human values, the values of these women. All the women we interviewed worked, they faced daily challenges.
“These challenges are universal challenges faced by women, whether they are in big cities or small towns. They worry about the household, their children, their livelihood. Therefore, we try to highlight the values that these women bring to the table in carrying through the challenges.”
Liew wants to make the point that this book is not meant to define Malaysian women completely: “As we travelled and talked to many women throughout the country, we were not seeking to come up with a complete definition of the Malaysian women. We strove instead to depict the everyday existence of various women in their environment (physical, cultural, traditional, religious, etc) and treat their stories from a humanistic point of view.”
Adds Shekar, “We wanted to provide snapshots of these women’s lives.
“Look at our society. We’re evolving daily. We went to longhouses, and there are Astro dishes. It may seem like a small thing, but the people living at these longhouses used to gather after meals to talk about their day, to spend time as a community. Now they go off to their own rooms and watch Astro. A big chunk of tradition is lost as we speak.”
As Shekar’s voice trails off in contemplation, Liew picks up the slack. “We approached this project in a factual way,” she says. “We want to document all these changes. Every story here is told as it is.
“One of my favourites is Strands (on page 204). When we walked into the kampung in Kuala Terengganu, someone said to us, ‘Dulu tempat ni boleh dengar orang buat songket’. He was telling us, years ago we would have heard the looms humming constantly, as the weavers worked in daylight. Now the looms have been silenced.
“It was a very lyrical moment, and sad. There are now only a few weavers left. It hits you that an entire culture is disappearing.”
In Strands, the woman’s daughter still weaves, but she only weaves when she leaves her suburban life and comes back to the kampung. She lives in Puchong, Selangor, but she cannot imagine weaving there. Only when she is home, she says. In the kampung, her two little children hear the loom go click, click, click, a sound they never hear in their Puchong home.
“To me, the loom is a metaphor for something you lose because your life has changed,” says Liew. “It is the same all over Malaysia; people move to the city and lose their small town practices and values.”
For Shekar, it is the story of a Mak Yong performer in Angin (page 183) that strikes a chord – because of Liew’s incredible writing, he says. Every time he reads the story, it takes him back to when the spirited 86-year-old told them about her childhood and her love affair with the ancient performance art.
“I can still remember exactly that moment, the way the sun streamed into the room, her voice as she sang, the way her hand moved in the performance,” says Shekar.
Growing the Lily
Finding these women and their stories was a massive undertaking for Liew and Shekar: they scoured the entire country over a three-month period, beginning in June last year.
“We were on the road most of the time, sometimes coming back to home base for a couple of days, then we would set off again,” says Liew, adding, “We did a total of 105 interviews, and I wrote 75 stories. In the end, 65 were published. We tried not to be repetitive in the stories that we chose.”
Says Shekar, “Most of the interviews, about 85%, were spontaneous. We saw the women and simply approached them. About 15% were pre-arranged.
“Our modus operandi would be for Suet Fun to approach these women. She would chat with them and tell them what we were doing. I would take pictures of them while they talked. None of the pictures were posed. Some of the pictures I took with the camera on my lap. I didn’t want to be intrusive.
“I wanted to capture the emotion of the subjects as they talked about their lives.”
So involved were they in these women’s stories that every time they come back home, there was an uncomfortable shift in perception.
“When you have just been talking to a woman who ekes out a living selling sea shells and makes probably RM5 a day, and then here you are sitting down to a meal in a restaurant that could easily cover her entire month’s expenses, the feeling is indescribable,” says Shekar.
“Yes, the seashell woman,” Liew interjects. “When I saw her, I immediately thought of that childhood tongue-twister. It was true! There is a woman selling seashells by the seashore!
“The truth is that she is so poor that she has to sell seashells. It changes you inside. But amidst the poverty is great pride. She is making the best of it.”
What does Shahrizat have to say about the finished book, I ask.
“She said to me, ‘These are the people I see every day! Why can’t we talk about them?’ Well, hopefully now people know about these women,” Shekar says.
After my interview with Liew and Shekar, I decide to give the book another once over. I find the stories even more powerful with a second reading, with the added insight the authors had offered.
I can hear the click of the songket looms in Strands more clearly and smell the salty sea air that Rosnata breathes in Shells as she peddles her shells. And I can definitely feel the breeze in the home of the regal Mak Yong performer in Angin.
Has my perception changed after talking to the very people who gave birth to this book? Like any doting parents, their child is perfect to them, flaws and all.
Would I have preferred to see more of urban women with their equally challenging task of balancing family and career, old and new? Yes, perhaps because I can most readily identify with that situation. But perhaps that is a discourse for another book.
But I do see their point of view and what they set out to achieve. They lent a voice to women who would otherwise be ignored by mainstream media. For these women have fairly ordinary lives, with all the trials and tribulations all women go through – which is exactly what the authors were trying to explain to me when I asked them if the book was a fair representation of Malaysian women. Point taken.
For now, I will lose myself in the lives of these women that I do not know, yet know.
Myanmar to Malaysia
I HAD encountered the title Gilding the Lily before. A pictorial story about women in Myanmar by photographer S.C. Shekar had the very same title. I had published it two years ago in Marie Claire, the magazine I was heading.And that magazine article, I discovered, had a little something to do with this Lily’s production.
“You ran the article in the same issue that also featured an interview with Datuk Shahrizat’s son (Women, Family, and Community Development Minister Datuk Seri Shahrizat Abdul Jalil),” explains Shekar.
“She was flipping through the magazine for the piece on him and saw our story. She called me up and said she wanted something similar done, but on Malaysian women. That was what got the ball rolling.
“Since (author Liew) Suet Fun and I had worked on the Myanmar women’s story, it was a natural progression to collaborating on this new project.”
Photojournalist Shekar (who, by the way, worked at The Star years ago) has had work published in Malaysia and overseas while Liew is an established freelance writer who has penned several books profiling top Singaporean chefs.
Her most recent project is a book on Loagan Bunut National park in Sarawak for a UNDP/GEF (United Nations Development Programme/ Global Environment Fund) supported project.
Gilding The Lily is Shekar and Liew’s first book together, although they have collaborated previously on editorial work and several exhibitions where writing was used as a complimentary medium to photography.
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