A book of modern Malaysian literature has been newly acquired by the Thammasat University Libraries through the generosity of the late Professor Benedict Anderson and Ajarn Charnvit Kasetsiri. Ripples and other stories is a collection of short stories by the Malaysian author Shih-Li Kow. It is shelved in the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room of the Pridi Banomyong Library. Born in 1968, Shih-Li Kow earned a degree in chemical engineering, and lives in Kuala Lumpur with her son and extended family. Ripples and Other Stories was honored by appearing on the shortlist of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, an international literary prize presented for the best short story collection. Based in Cork, Ireland, the honor is named after the Irish author Frank O’Connor (1903 –1966) who was admired for his short stories and memoirs. The TU Libraries own a number of books by Frank O’Connor, including his stories, his memoirs, his edition of Irish short stories by other writers, and a survey of Irish literature. Shih-Li Kow’s work has made an international impact, and has been translated into French and Italian. Ripples and Other Stories focuses on Malaysian society through different characters, such as a lady who considers that dengue fever is a disease for low class people. Another subject is the worries of an office worker in Kuala Lumpur. There are fairy tales, ghost stories, and other kinds of stories. In an e-mail interview posted online, Shih-Li Kow gave advice to readers who might be thinking about trying to write stories themselves:
I approach writing much as I would approach the acquiring of any new skill. Learn the basics, check out what the pros do, practise, get some feedback, then go back through the cycle again. Learn more, read some more, write some more, and try to have some fun along the way. Daily life is a great source of ideas, and I happen to work in a very colourful part of town (Kow is a manager at a shopping centre in the China Town area of Kuala Lumpur). There are also members of my family who are wonderful narrators.
Since she is busy working and raising a family, the author has relatively little time to dedicate to fiction:
A typical writing session is maybe 30 minutes during breakfast teh tarik after I send my son off to school. Editing, after dinner, if I’m up to it. Longer stretches on weekends. I don’t have much of a life!…There isn’t much choice when real life pays the bills! I write when I can, I scribble in notebooks a lot. Having targets helps. With Ripples, I told myself I would have at least one story a month, fully edited and rewritten if necessary. I might have three or four in the works but I would complete that one piece. Actually finishing something and chalking it up is a great motivator. Some luxuries have fallen by the wayside – don’t ask me how many movies I’ve watched, or what happened on CSI or in Perak, or when I last went on a proper holiday.
When asked about fellow Asian writers she enjoys reading, she mentions Ho Sui-Jim, whose work has appeared in the anthology, Urban Odysseys: KL Stories, also set in Kuala Lumpur. She also admires Christopher Yin, whose writing was published in the collection Silverfish New Writing 5. According to Worldcat.org, neither of these books is in any library collection in Thailand, so TU students and ajarns may especially appreciate the sustained interest shown by Ajarns Charnvit and Benedict Anderson for ASEAN culture, especially literature. About writers from other parts of the world, Shih-Li Kow explains that she enjoys the American writers Raymond Carver, Toni Morrison, and Annie Proulx, all of whom are represented in the TU Libraries collection. She also recommends the novels The Malayan Trilogy by Anthony Burgess; Life of Pi by Yann Martel, and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. In an interview from 2015 for The Malay Mail, Shih-Li Kow stated that as she grew up,
Writing was for homework, exams and the occasional school newsletter. Later, in working life, it was for letters, reports, emails and office magazines. Being a writer was never a realistic option as a profession then. It still isn’t, for me.
Even so, Shih-Li Kow managed to find the time to write a novel, The Sum of Our Follies, about Lubok Sayong, an imaginary town in Perak, a state in the northwest of Peninsular Malaysia. The novel’s narrator is Auyong, a middle-aged man who leaves a job as manager of a supermarket to work in a lychee canning factory. Receiving some professional recognition has not changed the author, and the website of her publisher, Silverfish Books, describes her as follows:
Shih-li Kow is a Malaysian author who needs no introduction. Her work is well known and admired, but she is a maddeningly difficult person to write about because she is such a private person. A writer diva, she is not. The little we know about her is that she has a chemical engineering degree and manages malls to pay her rent – what a horrible thankless job. And she still finds time to write. Maybe, that’s how she maintains her sanity.
A sample of Shih-Li Kow’s imaginative efforts was published in Microfiction Monday Magazine. Microfiction may be any story containing fewer than 300 words, although Microfiction Monday Magazine sets a limit of 100 words for story-telling. Shih-Li Kow entitled her story Thirst:
We were on the move again, hunting rain clouds. We have been too slow and for days, we saw nothing but patches of dried mud left by others. But today, we found a baby cloud snagged on trees in an abandoned valley. We put out our buckets and we killed it. Mother was the most savage, as always. When it bled, we stood in its rain and opened our mouths to feed. Although we were told to hide our bodily pleasures, I could not stop my spasms. After the endless thirst, every drop of water was the purest drug.
However that story may make readers feel, the fact that it manages to inspire any response at all in only 99 words is a noteworthy achievement. Her publisher Raman Krishnan, founding director of Silverfish Books, declared in a statement posted online:
[Shih-Li Kow] promised to send her work in by the end of October, and she did, despite her hectic work and home-making schedule. She works as an executive for six days a week while bringing up her ten-year-old son, Jack. While other writers expend their creativity in cooking up excuses for not completing their work, Shi-Li uses her creativity to write. And when she was told that she would have to tweak her work a little more, she had no hesitation. She is a perfectionist who takes pride in her work and would not allow anything she is not absolutely satisfied with to be published.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)