A Kid Can Teach The Uber Writer

I was eating lunch at Shits and Grits when a young kid sitting behind me started asking me where I was from and what it was like growing up in Malaysia. He was a curious child and the more questions he asked the more my childhood country, Malaysia, sounded like an alien planet to him! ;-)

For example, he asked about our bathrooms. I told him about the toilet bowl that was sunk into cement, how one had to squat over the hole (yes, I know, the subject of toilets come up a lot during my lunchtime, for some reason).



Anyway, this type of toilet is normal in Asia, although the sitting down kind is probably prevalent now. But when I was growing up, this was the kind I know.

He asked me about fruits that I couldn't get here (meaning Little Town, here, not New York). I told him about the durian, with his huge thorns and the yellow fruit inside that smelled to white people; the rambutan, the hairy red fruits that come in clusters; the coconut, the green kind that monkeys are trained to climb up trees to get. He was just fascinated.

I horrified him with no hot water (remember, he asked when I was growing up), no color TV, no Game Boys, no carpets on the floor. He thought driving on the other side of road was funny ("wouldn't that cause accidents?", which by the way, is very uniquely child-logic, as in, everyone is wrong because mom and dad don't do it that way).

I told him about school uniforms and how we all had to line up when the school bell rang. That we had to do our homework without calculators or computers. That our teachers were allowed to pinch or hit us with a ruler (hey, my mom approved!). He was fascinated at how I could automatically recite my timestable in a singsong voice (5 times 5 is 25, 5 times 6 is 30, 9 times 9 is 81....), heehee.

There was so much to tell him! Of course, he wouldn't understand what combing long hair was like in the days when there were no hair conditioner till Kao came into existence. Or when school allowance was 15 (Malaysian) cents a day (ai!). Or that my favorite thing to collect was those big pencil boxes with the Japanese anime with girls with huge innocent eyes and flowers in their hair (can you imagine the hentai art boxes now....) and how it was fun to sharpen pencils so I could arrange them in my pretty boxes. No, I didn't tell him these things because his eyes were getting as big as those anime girls.

What he enjoyed was stories of how some of us didn't have electricity and had to live by gaslight at night--he thought that was cool. He loved hearing about living next to the smelly open market where all the kids can go see the fish with their heads lying on the table and watch chickens being boiled in water. THAT was ultra cool.

But when I asked him whether he would like to go see a country like that, he said, after a pause, "Only if I can bring my X-Box and mom can bring her laptop. That way we don't have to live such a hard life like you did. We can just order from the Internet."

Hahahahahahahahaha. I like the kid who thinks ahead.

It isn't just another country, of course. For those of us who went to college in the late 70s and 80s, everything is ALIEN to those of us who are used to being hooked up to all kinds of wireless media these days.

WHAT? No Starbucks?!

What is one of the main things in your childhood that some kid today wouldn't have any concept of? These conversations are relevant to me because as a military-spy-high tech writer, I have to essentially bring an alien world to my readers. The best part is the kid's last remark, because that's something that adds the flavor to the strange dish, the kind of thing that all of us can laugh at, and understand.

Next writing lesson: Demonstrating how to squat over the Asian toilet, bwah! Hey, look at it this way--the significant other can't hog the darn powder room with his newspaper! Heehee.

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