mee skin

The scene is an extremely busy Bukit Bintang street. That crossing between the many malls crashing people with each other. The lady of anxieties’ worst of dreams. What loud cars and motorbikes, what false breasts and beer stained breaths tell you is that you are a long way from home. It is a cloudy day and everyone seemingly has somewhere to be. How hollow a human body can bring itself to burrow and be. Reaching the state of an almost invisibility, yes, it can be scary, it can also feel free. I tell them about the bathtub I always see myself inside. The anger won’t subside, the sadness won’t subside. I only took the advice given to more often invite others into the places I go. Through my words, show them what I’ve yet to know. Even in moments like this, in an extremely busy Bukit Bintang street. With scratch tickets and half ass burgers with never enough lettuce. I worry constantly in a longing for purity. Some thing I did not manage to keep to myself for long before abandonment awakened the insensible lengths one goes for love and surrendering to even what is predatory. I wash myself in this tub, in the middle of the zebra crossing and I am completely naked. The bathtub is full of soap bubbles and warm water. I am so comfortable here and no one looks at a ghost girl’s apparent transparent nudity. How can they see, really when even when looking me in the eyes, what’s obvious are the sights that pass right through me.

You know, when I was a child hardly eight years of age, I came to a point of wanting more than anything, to wake up as a big grown girl. The adults in my life at that time were not the best people to play and acknowledge the way of children. They liked manners, talking about what ‘matters’. I was too small to fit into the big rooms or experience the rides. I wished and prayed for a magical way into adulthood as soon as I humanly could. Birthdays failed to excite me until the numbers of my age reached double digits. It begins with your first decade on Earth, 10. It was not every year that I received gifts and sweet cakes but not a year passes by on that same date that I do not acknowledge the increase in age and skin creases. As I write this, I am in my second term of the decades. Two years and nine months into being 22, I fail to completely comprehend the big beauty of what adulthood used to look like from jaded jet black eyes.

The issues that surface in present times adulthood can seem so superficial through the perspective of the inexperienced. Inexperience in this matter does not coincide with age, but rather through participation. I am referring to the social changes coupled with the rise of the worldwide web. Through active participation of this construct, we have all together birthed many new terms, currencies and institutions from the simple curating and creation of creativities. Every person is free to choose the angle of photographs and perspectives to portray to the world with a few clicks of some buttons. It is fairly simple, until it is not. With this, comes the dilution of creation to serve as ‘content’ for a profile’s page. The intention of the creator is then consumed and the narrative changed by many differing opinions arriving at the many more questionable conclusions. Being present becomes the second most important thing to the numbers. I have had the opportunity to discuss this worry with creators who have succeeded in their respective fields (fine art, film) way back before these platforms even existed or were necessary (late 1970’s) They tell me many things like how they have managed to grow their own cult collectors and followings through networking. How unnecessary this tool truly is, how inactive they are on those platforms and are able to profit from their practices anyway. That statement in itself is a privilege, I argue. How lucky one must be to be acknowledged and given an abundance of choices and chances through real life connections. To a small me, shallow waters me, dry phone contact book me, it sounded like the stuff of powder, glitter fairy tales.

 

Being an active practitioner in this point in time is undoubtedly one hundred percent different from past decades. Slowly the population of profiled popularity grows among the young and sometimes clever. In my further discussion with those creatives, they had also mentioned the help of governmental organisations and bodies at the time of their rise, that was very much pivotal to the growth of their circle and connections that would then contribute to their ability to showcase and eventually sell off their work. No social media necessary. Those were times when in order to get to know somebody, you either hear about them through word of mouth or have shook their hand. Their number was in your telephone. In this era, we are fed the essences of what somebody chooses to portray themselves as and have consumed the entirety of their image without having even ever spoken a word to them. This is the problem, this is where the dilution occurs. Scrolling through the worldwide webscapes of these platforms have quickly replaced the many etiquettes required of a person in the past. Newspapers used to be where information was shared and people were introduced to the public’s eye. This puts into question the actual necessity of it’s stances now. Besides being an established outlet that is trusted by many, this generation has been given the opportunities to replicate that exact personal market and outlet for recognition all by their lonesome. Although this tool exists to connect societies from across the globe, it has also drifted people further apart in deeper confusion. How many of us see this accessibility and attempt to follow the blueprint only to not succeed? Perhaps for some that have nothing else to fall back on or a family name that can lunge one further in the game, this can be seen as a very good thing. A very good thing that can erect many new connections and possibilities through only screens.

 

I’m asked, how is it such a painful issue at hand? Some just fail to understand. The problems lies deeper than words can attempt to explain. You see, in Malaysia, there is no importance stressed upon the picking up and learning of social sciences. The subjects that prove it’s importance that are essentially in line with creativity. I was surprised to be introduced to many of those subjects for the first time in my short period of attending a local university only to find out that a younger child of a family friend who is studying at a private institution is studying the exact same thing at her small age. This alerts an imbalance in critical thought processes among Malaysians who spend their schooling days in governmental schools and who are less fortunate than to know what to look up or what books to read. Although the internet exists at our very fingertips, not knowing where to look is the main point of this problem. From this root of lack in exposure, most Malaysians are then basing their understanding and opinions from the echoed thoughts of another person. We do not see the urgency in thinking for ourselves when someone else has seemingly perfectly put into words the sentences we would like to say but fail in doing so. There is a deep connection many feel to the critical thoughts and creative work put out by local artists, but there is not enough understanding of perspective and differing philosophies for the piece to be any more than it is presented. A shoe is only a shoe, and on occasions, it proves itself to be. But what colour was the shoe, why was the shoe that colour? What material is the shoe? Where did the design originate? Your shoe is just a shoe, but if you look close, it can also speak to you.

 

Somewhere along these lines, lies a deep longing for the absence of thought. Divorcing oneself from this dilution is possible but not without struggle. Succumbing to solace takes a toll on collaborations, projects and personal growth that can quickly be achieved with active participation on the net. Being angry doesn’t get you very far, no, not right now. It’s dangerous and many of us are too poor to face it’s consequences. We are too poor to have an option, to quit or to function outside of what we can create for ourselves and shout across the globe in one breath. On many days, I exist in a daze in that bathtub in Bukit Bintang. On many others, I must only get out of bed and face by day, whatever may come.