Reflections by Cheah Wui Jia

Written by: Cheah Wui Jia.

Sometimes it seems like heaven is a place on earth.

At the mosque we were visiting, I saw the young girls clad in tudung, running around joyfully, as if there were no such thing as pain in life.

And I took it all in, smiling. It seemed… so pure. I smiled at a young child and she smiled back at me, before running somewhere to hide behind a door. I thought my heart would burst. Dramatic, I know, but me, being the sentimental freak that I am, just cannot help myself. While they scuttled around like little mice playing hide and seek, I understood what purity may possibly mean. Trust. Devoid of fearfulness or presumption. Children love with an innocence that no adult can ever understand. They don’t see the colour of your skin. Or your body shape. Or whether you are doing drugs, or sex work. They just love you if you give them candy. Or make them laugh.

It makes sense. Loving the human being. Imperfect in many ways but, nonetheless, human in every way.

The people that I have met are pure at heart. Strangers I come across in Chiang Mai clasp their hands and say “Sawadika,” with a humility that the world needs most in a contemporary age of despair and disappointment. Institutions of authority have failed us in one way or another. Corrupt organizations, themselves comprising fallen human beings, have swindled away hopes and lives like conscience never existed. We live in a period when truth seems elusive, when motives are incessantly questioned, when ideals evaporate to leave an arid desert where dreams are nothing but mere shiny mirage, when a flurry of ideology seems destined to implode under a heavy weight of contradiction.

But out of brokenness and sorrow comes forth a faith that can be purer than gold. Faith is that transcendental signified that we so desperately need, in a world full of flickering simulacra and empty signifiers. Faith is that wall that came crashing down when a crowd that shrieked for joy climbed over its remnants from the East into the West of Germany. Faith is when a woman, shackled under house arrest for 14 years, still possesses a heart that drums to the beats of freedom, because she loves her country too much to sing mournful desert songs. Faith is when we relentlessly decline to have our hope dictated by the shifting conditions of surrounding circumstances that may seem hopelessly negative.

We can choose to turn cynical and hard hearted, deriving certainty from a postmodern form of numbing depression. We can choose to casually shrug, or complain out of bitter resentment and throw our hands up in the air. Nothing is going to work. So why try?

Or we can choose to make a difference, rise to the occasion and believe that we can change things. That we can love, and make purity possible.

The NGOs I have visited demonstrate signs of an unfaltering faith. Caring for refugees who flee from tyranny and oppression, for sex workers who suffer from stigma, for AIDS victims whose lives are dwindling a little each day. In other words, people who have dedicated their lives towards caring for other people who may have to keep looking over their shoulders with a gaze so furtive, clutched by a fear so paralyzing it makes it difficult to breathe easily.

I wish I could describe to you, in words, my study trip at Chiang Mai. But I can’t. This doesn’t stem from a sheer laziness to type out this diary entry, or from the belief in a Lacanian theory that language is hopelessly unreliable. Words just cannot do justice to the study trip. I wish I could taken you by the hand, to urge you to walk with me and absorb the sights, sounds, tastes, feelings that so profoundly, in the words of another diary entry, assailed me, at every phase of the trip. I can only offer you snippets that I hope, paint a picture of Chiang Mai and the people that I encountered.

I will be unapologetically honest now. There were times when I questioned what faith and love really mean. In many ways, my Christian faith was violently at odds with the lifestyle of the homosexual or the sex worker. I knew I had no right to judge anyone either. Smoking, drinking, cursing, and cracking jokes (that made me blush or gulp), were what some of my friends did on a regular basis. Habits like these were something I had to accept, and attempt to overlook. Constantly surrounded by church members, I had been accustomed to the habits of the devout Christian which clearly excluded behavior deemed as worldly or ungodly. But I knew I had to suspend my judgmental tendencies, and accept differences in doctrine (Christianity versus Social Science) that threatened to mar the entire Chiang Mai experience for me. I had to learn to love, over and over again. To unclench my tightly clutched fist, over and over again. I prayed at night, asking God to help me understand and love people better. 

At the ice breakers exercise that kicked off the GABFAI session, I fully understood the entire painful exercise of trying to keep my clenched fists closed (while an annoying opponent tried to pry it open). When Ann asked how clenching one’s fists felt, some of my friends automatically replied “It felt powerful, like I was in control”. For me, before the exercise was over, I already knew its aim deep down in my heart. It is safe to feel as if one is in control. Safe to know that the world is clearly mapped out and highly predictable. But that is not the real world.

I understood what Dr Yeoh meant when he urged us to leave our comfort circle of friends and attempt to spend time with acquaintances beyond our familiar cliques (or “factions”). Judgment barely begins with people on the fringes of society like the prostitute, or the hardcore drug addict, or the homeless refugee. It begins with the people we come into contact with in our daily lives. People whose lives are ordinary, just like ours. If we cannot overcome miniscule differences by loving one another unconditionally, we cannot expect to bridge the larger gaps that divide the centre from the periphery in society.

For the record, the adjective “lame” hardly means Lochna’s sprained ankle. I truly enjoyed the company I had. I felt honoured being there among them.