Thank You, Mr. Bean

Mr. Bean tries to sink the Titanic, but the Titanic won't sink. He scrubs his pits with a teddy bear, then stands. The suds cover his naughty bits. He grabs a towel, which wraps like pants around his thighs, and heads through the door, boat in one hand, animal in the other.

He's in a car now, and, for safety, he checks his nostrils in the rearview and eyes the pebbles beyond his left-side passenger window. A man with evil dipping eyebrows emerges from a truck three times the size of Mr. Bean's car and dashes a sardonic smile our hero's way.

Mr. Bean is not to be daunted by the problem emerging before his eyes. He parks his car with the bumper parallel to the curb. A nice policewoman with a sharply angled nose waves the tip left and right. Silly Mr. Bean.

Mr. Bean sulks around. Aha! His face lights up. But wait—a gray sedan swoops in on Mr. Bean's new parking spot. Mr. Bean's lips move in a formation that looks like the word "Fuck." Malaysia! Oh my!

He sulks some more. And now... what's this? He's kissing the ground in unbridled, don't-give-a-toss-about-his-immune-system glee. A parking spot, at last!

He stalks into a gray building and climbs into a lush theatre seat to enjoy the big-picture flick. It's the tale-end of the film, and a giant boat is sinking. He missed the whole darn thing. His head drops in exasperation as he realizes the moral of his own story (?).

"The End" expands across the screen. Ah, what a tale. Thank you, Mr. Bean.


Editorial note: Mr. Bean is a popular cartoon in Malaysia, or at least on the train that runs to and from destinations north of Kuala Lumpur on the west coast. The television played five episodes, at least, with the sound muted and no subtitles on my trip from the farm to the city. This post is a recounting of one of those riveting Mr. Bean episodes—a tribute, if you will. I learned so much about life from that little cartoon man.

Portrait of the Morning

The air vibrates with a loud buzz, like a giant mosquito is circling my head, searching for a landing spot the way police helicopters search for runners back home. There's a banana flower arching into its life-giving trunk, its laden upper stem spiked with small green fruits, the top uppermost section sprayed with the first rays of morning light. A pink and mauve pineapple, bursting with teenage hope, lifts its proud head between the matured leaves of the plant, the stalks a green mane falling away from the center in reverential duty.

I take a sip from the mug warming my palms and savor a mouthful of nes-lo*, easy on the lo, with a sprinkling of masala spice.**

The petai tree waves its thin fern arms slowly above the dense shaded mass, dancing back and forth to a silent morning rave. Wood cracks between my feet, sending vibrations with a loud snap up my calves. Rocks click softly down the weathered brown slope.

An eggplant climbs undetectably, cautiously out of its maternal flower, purpling beneath the gaze of the long bean tentacles that dangle, sultrily, from the thin metal rafts above. A bird, too far away to be carefully seen, alights on a branch, singing gustily into the coming day.

A butterfly, black with green-centered wings, large and gliding in its traversing, flits past.

The long, thin leaves of an overgrown weed ache into the center of the path. A fly with a red head and a wingspan the length of a thumb's nail pauses near a drop of dew. Three more join it, making a v-formation reminiscent of birds or fighter-jets. Warriors of the forest.

Popo and Pupu, my two favorite dogs of the bunch of seven, roll over each other down the rocky driveway, barking and growling into each other's oversized triangle ears.

The flies lift off and disappear into the morning air, the only give-away of their presence the loud, persistent buzz of their flapping external engines.


*A mix of Nescafé instant coffee (Malaysia's second caffeine staple after a creamy black tea drink called teh tarik) and Milo, a malted chocolate beverage made from powder.
**Masala spices are used in Indian masala tea.

Forlorn Lovers

I imagine Finola is madly in love with me. It's the only way I can keep from responding to her stares with derisive inner dialogue or sadness. And anyhow, it's more fun this way.

I glance to the left of her earlobe, off into the coming evening, repeatedly. She thinks I'm looking at her and gazes longingly into my face. Her heart drops with disappointment to find I am not searching for tenderness in her eyes. I sweep a strand of hair, slowly, behind my ear, running my fingertips down my neck. She wishes I would do the same to her. I spoon rice to my mouth. She fantasizes about my moving lips. Poor Finola. Love-struck so quickly, and to such little avail.

She's an interesting character, Finola. Spent her whole life in alternative communities where she consumed nothing but raw, organic veggies and worked for no pay, simply subsisting off of that which the community afforded her. She wouldn't eat a processed-sugar-filled candy bar if her life depended on it. She'll glare that I-love-pork smile right off your face. She's hippie and she knows it.

Yes, Finola has never so much as pointed her toe anywhere but left—suckled The Revolution instead of breast milk; stood with the support of Free Will instead of table legs; sucked home-grown carrots instead of lollipops. And she thinks herself superior for it, a fact she's not shy about displaying.

There's something about me, too, that seems to invite her judgment. She's a fan of scoffing just loudly enough so I can hear, and that smile on her face always has a mocking curl to it. I try to engage her in some friendly chatter, dialogue about the shape of change, joke about yankin' weeds, but she only gives me that downward glance and a tight-lipped grimace.

Well, but that's love, ain't it?

I sing softly about forlorn lovers now as we scrub organic four-angle bean remnants from silver pans with homemade rice enzyme cleaner, our bodies bent over the sinks, laboring side by side.

But CAN You Sing with all the Voices?

I'm wandering the farm's weed-tossed walkways, singing "Colors of the Wind"* at the guava trees. I'm confident, without a trace of malu.** I know, I know, it seems amazing—I myself wouldn't have believed it possible a few days ago—but I am no hero, friends. I am just a woman, a woman who had a simple dream: To sing a corny Disney song about nature unabashedly into the wind.

I'll be honest: It was no easy task getting here. It took a few days of reconciling with Finola's perennially skeptical gaze and Khian Ee's probing tongue. It took a few days of remembering that I don't care to take life or people's opinions of me too seriously. It's been a long journey, a journey replete with sneaky humming cut mid-melody and silent longing stares into the weeds. Sometimes, when I've thought myself alone, I've even sung the song full out, rerouting the melody only upon discovery by my detective-eyed friends in order to obscure the song's true origins.

This morning, though, while clearing a bed of its irreverent, fruitless green, I felt my outer skin begin to peel away like a rolinia rotting in the sun. I yanked a deep root from the ground and let Tegan and Sara bubble from my lips. I turned and the rhythm picked up pace. I did a little internal jig. Today was the day, I knew. Today was the day I'd fulfill my life's purpose and become a Disney character. Today was the day I'd sing with all the voices of the mountains.

We finished our task and I left Matt (Ben)*** humming quietly beside Finola. They tramped away from the patch, and I drifted into the wind in the opposite direction.

I took a minute to savor the final moment before my world was to be revolutionized, looking pensively into the mess of vine-climbers and moldy tree stumps.

And then it began.

A grave question started to rise in my mind, slow at first, then faster and faster until it was clamoring against my skull with the urgency of a thousand impatient revolutionaries. I steeled my nerves and prepared to make history. "How HIIIIIIIGH does the sycamore growww?" God. I already knew the farm's colonizing retort. I sang louder.

"If you CUT it down, then you'll NEver knoOOWWWW. AND YOU'LL NEVER HEAR THE WOLF CRY TO THE BLUE-CORN MOOOON FOR WHETHERRR"

Damn, it felt good, siding with Nature. I turned to see Finola sitting in the distance, a cigarette on her lips and a hand draped lazily across her knee. Her face seemed turned deliberately away from me. She was definitely judging me.

But it was too late. I was on a high-speed train to Fantasyland: Malaysia Edition, and I couldn't have stopped for anything, even if I had wanted. My destiny had taken over.

"YOU THINK THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO ARE PEOPLE..."

Finola turned her body slightly further away.

"ARE THE PEOPLE WHO LOOK AND THINK LIKE YOUUUU!"

I followed the path, which happened to curve closer to my best friend's perch. My volume dropped. "But if you walk the footsteps of a strangerrrrr..."

I could have imagined it, but I swear I saw her lips moving in time with my own. She took another drag from her hand-rolled cigarette, shifting her arm to the other knee.

EPILOGUE: "Come run the hidden pine trails of the fooooreeest. Come taste the sun-sweet berries of the eaaaaaaaarth. Come rooooll in all the riches all aroooound uuus! And for once, never wonder what they're woooorth."


*Note: This post is in no way an endorsement of the Pocahontas cartoon's historical inaccuracies or tendencies to cultural appropriation/misrepresentation.
**"Malu" means, roughly, "shy" or "shyness" in Bahasa Malaysia.
***See post titled "Goat Manure."

Goat Manure

"A bad one," Finola says. Khian Ee's finger still lingers in the direction of Tesco. "In every town, they build." Finola responds with a troubled sigh.

I pick up her English-Irish hybrid accent in my inner dialogue (a subconscious internalization of the American inferiority-complex narrative? of pop culture romanticizations of the linguistic motherland and its reservoir of native whiteness? or childish delight in stumbling laughing over nasally-elongated vowels?). She has long blonde hair tangled by the wind whipping through Khian Ee's ancient white van.

We whip up, bump up, up, left and right down a road through the Titiwangsa mountains on our return to GreenWish Veggie Garden. I feel refreshed, recharged by mental food in the form of Time and Fortune 500 articles and by world news and worldy facebook news afforded by my one and a half hours in a real cafe with real cafe. I spent most of that time reading in relative solitude, but, when I had just finished pouring over the word-bites of journalistic narrative, Matt had slipped into the chair beside me at the cafe table. He had his own cup emblazoned with the logo "espresso yourself" warming his already-tropically-warmed fingers. A fellow coffee lover, his drink unsweetened and un-iced.

Matt's name is actually Ben, but with that perfectly curly hair and those gray-green eyes, he's Matt in my head. (I pray that I don't slip up and call Matt by his given name—by me, I mean—out loud.) He sits now, quiet as is the general standard for us volunteers, in the front passenger seat. Finola sits beside me, her mocking blue eyes oscillating between Khian Ee's waved hair and the adolescent mat rempits* dotting the roadside.

For the past three days, I have been working like I've never worked before: chopping the hell out of big-ass weeds, pulling unwanteds from the soil, learning too much about soil to ever call it dirt, laying down heavy mulch, pretending my arms are fat with muscle like Arnold, silently groaning because they're not, still insisting that yes, I can load and push that wheelbarrow, planting fruit and rice and corn crops, harvesting banana and papaya and guava, learning a shit-ton about compost (which, incidentally, involves a ton of shit**), learning a wheelbarrow-full of things about organic farming (which, incidentally, involves... okay, I won't), feeling every muscle in my body, sweating out every pound of my body weight, eating so fucking well, and not cussing out loud even though I'm on vacation because I'm working alongside a Malaysian Buddhist pacifist who preaches harmony over lunches of noodles and uncooked vegetables.

I've had moments here, up in the isolated reaches of Malaysian mountainside—where, it's rumored, tigers roam the rainforest—in which I've thought, "My god, this is America," or, "Holy fuckin' shit—Amurrica!" A ridiculous notion, I know. But even as the ninety-degree rain washes the ninety-degree sweat from my body, the dirt in my eyebrow feels like a piece of history I've only just now turned to face. Pastoral America, image of my country's past and countries past, the claim to everything holy and dirty about our godforsaken land of the free. Slavery, poverty, abundance, liberty and pursuits of happiness or hell, the mythos of ladders and achievements of hate—everything built from the literary majesty of the countryside. The soiled hoe that built our backbone, our real and imagined lifeline, in sickness and in health. The farm—the place my father's father and his mother and their fathers and mothers in turn sweated out a life, the place where their envious eyes looked to close relatives who owned rather than labored, in turn watching my grandfather's sweat in fanned disdain. The plantation, the farm, the garden. The growth of those United States.

I feel American as hell, and I baffle my host and fellow volunteers when I walk to the field with a baseball cap on my head, dropping words like "wassup" alongside "confounding." They don't know what to make of this Amurrican gurl. I can tell I'm confounding their stereotypes. Then we go to an Indian restaurant and I realize that even my claim to Amurrica's mainstream images has become complicated as I dip my fingers into the rice and scoop it to my mouth. The volunteers try not to stare.

"You eat well with your hands," says Khian Ee. I can tell he thinks it's gross, and he spoons his curry delicately to his lips.

This, when an hour before he was digging his own hands into goat manure.


*"Mat rempit" technically means "illegal motorbike street racer," but Malaysians use the term colloquially to refer to anyone who does dangerous things on a bike.
**The recipe the farm uses actually requires only 10% goat manure.  But when you're makin' lots of compost...