When I was young, I lived for a time in Kuala Lumpur. Our house was in a rather new neighborhood that wasn’t fully developed. Several empty lots separated our house from our neighbors on one side. On the other, a local couple lived quietly until the early evening hours when a disagreement between partners would ensue, and the wife would chase the husband around with a butcher knife.
It was an exciting place. Exotic for obvious reasons, tropical and moist.
Behind our home was an unknown area, the perfect curiosity for children. My memory fails the particulars, but I do recall a wet and rainy day – not unusual – in which we explored what lied amongst the vegetation. We discovered a giant spider – big to all of us, scary as well. My brother stepped in quick sand, and we feared his drowning into a pool of light brown gunk.
On rainy days, the children of the neighborhood would meet in those empty lots, pick sides, and begin a mud ball fight. As in any ‘battle,’ we had strategies, defectors, and pain. The sneaky ones, myself included, would sometimes put rocks inside of the mud balls and throw them as hard as we could. The rain came down, the mud caked our clothes and hair, and we only stopped the fighting when the voices of our amahs coaxed us out of the downpour.
We sat with our parents on the front porch, our dogs slinking about to find a cool spot to rest. We watched the color of the sky change, and we felt the air get still.
I loved Malaysia.
We sucked sugar cane cut from the backyard. Laughed when my mother stepped on a thorn and thought it was the black king cobra lurking in our yard. And I cried and screamed when the monkey, a pet of neighbors down the block, would pull my hair.
I long to go back and see the place where I lived. To find the street where I went over the handlebars and ‘came this close to hitting a parked Mercedes,’ according to my father. To visit the local market. To see if the school I attended still stands.
My puzzle of childhood memory has lost many pieces. It is the ones I hold, trying to determine where their shape fits, that surface unexpectedly and I turn them in my hand.
When I sit here to write and think about what to share, I go back to the past to see if something of it can be told about the present. There is no concrete connection to today, but I know that those experiences are part of the present moment.
I’m drawn back in time when I’m looking for possibilities and trying to forge into new and unknown territory. I guess I’m trying to conjure that wide-eyed girl who went forth into the thicket and came out with new stories to tell.
