ASEAN holds women's story-reading evening

By Tam Notosusanto

JAKARTA (JP): Inen Maskerning and Ma Paw may not seem to have anything in common. After all, one is from Aceh, the other from Myanmar, and they both lead quite different lives.

But as their tales were told at the mezzanine foyer of the ASEAN Secretariat last Friday, it turned out the two women have an uncanny number of similarities.

Inen and Ma Paw were among the characters in eight stories recited by women from ASEAN countries in a one-night program called An Evening of ASEAN Women's Short Stories. The event was part of ASEAN Women's Month '98, an promotional event centering around the ASEAN Secretariat for the month of October. The night was filled with laughter, exotic languages and one case of stage fright.

Ten females from school age to middle age took turns to read out stories, most of which were selected from Perempuan, an anthology of short stories written by female writers from the ASEAN countries.

The readers were generally the wives or daughters of diplomats and ASEAN officials and, as the evening showed, they handled intonations and articulations quite admirably.

The evening began with Mignon Tan reading Emergence by the Filipino writer Lucila V. Hosillos. Tan, herself a Filipino, has lived in Indonesia for quite some time. During the reading she juggled three languages -- Hiligaynon, English and Indonesian -- with equal fluency as she flipped through the pages.

Through her effective rendition of Hosillos' dramatic writing, she brought the audience into a young village woman's journey of self-discovery as she reflects on her life by a river bank.

"...The darkness of her mind was brightened as if by a million stars, making it bright as day. A light shone into her feelings, thoughts, and her whole being. Everything conspired to make her aware of her femininity for the very first time. This emergence shining inside her now led her thoughts into a plan of action...."

The program came to its most enlightening moments when Esther Myint took the time to orate some cultural anecdotes before and during her reading of Zawgy's Her Spouse. This is the story that features Ma Paw, a simple village woman whose name literally means "a not-so-intelligent female."

Through Myint's alternate takes of Burmese and English, the audience came to know Ma Paw, the breadwinner who works hard everyday while her husband, although kind enough to look after the children, prefers a laid-back life sitting at home doing nothing.

Ma Paw puts up with Ko Hsin because, after all, he is a good husband, and a religious and charitable man who once spent some years at a Buddhist monastery as an apprentice monk.

The family is thrown into turmoil when one day Ko Hsin decides to become a monk again, relieving himself of any work and responsibility in the process. Thereafter he spends his days praying and showering anybody near him with religious preaching.

This comical story concludes with Ma Paw's ingenious strategy to bring her husband back to his senses, showing in the process that her name is one given in irony alone. Myint successfully brought out the sardonic charm of this little satire with her calm, unhurried reading.

Ma Paw found her soul sister in Inen Maskerning, the heroine of an Acehnese folk tale introduced by the youngest reader of the evening, eight-year-old Zulaika Husodo. The Al-Izhar Elementary School pupil came to the microphone dressed in smart Acehnese garb and gave a clear articulation of the village woman's tale. Although getting a little bogged down by the English translation, she breezed through the Indonesian parts without missing a single beat.

Through Husodo, the audience encountered Inen, who, very much like Ma Paw, is an industrious woman, a woman who would go an extra mile to regain her family's happy life, and a woman who has to cope with a husband half as industrious as she. Even though this is not a short story in a literal sense -- it was not among tales selected from the Perempuan anthology -- Inen's tale is no less inspiring.

A mixture of ASEAN women, among them the strong, the weak, the independent and the subservient, leapt out of the fine deliveries rendered.

Norain Ali, a Singaporean ASEAN official, was apologetic every time she switched from English to the Indonesian version of Miao Hsiou's Return. "Don't laugh at my accent," she continuously pleaded the audience.

But there was nothing to apologize for in her articulate and well-read rendition of the piece, which tells of regrets and missed chances.

Meanwhile, Indonesian author Marianne Katoppo read out her own story, A Home for Prapanca, an amusing observation of life as seen through the eyes of a cat.

Ratih Sanggarwati was assigned to the most stark and intense selection, Nguyen Thi's The Departure, which chronicles the day- to-day lives of three female Viet Cong guerrillas stationed in a secluded village. She did her job well, even though, as the evening's organizer Debra Yatim later confessed, the model-cum- businesswoman was unfamiliar to her material until the last minute.

The evening caught its sole case of stage fright when Netty Chalermpalanupap froze in front of the microphone. The young girl softly shook as her pleading mother, Polly, coaxed her to read out her part of Kamsing Srinawk's Dark Glasses. The elder Chalermpalanupap surrendered and told the amused audience: "Everything was OK when we rehearsed at home." But the show did go on as Netty's older sister, Netta, read the descriptive paragraphs in English while their mother voiced the exchanges in the delightful sounds of the Thai language.

Meanwhile, 14-year-old Malaysian Nadira Noordin made Cynthia Anton's autobiographical piece Nannan her own. The Jakarta International School student read the piece endearingly, as if she was telling a tale of her own beloved grandmother, all the way to the poignant end.

"...Her last words after she had done her cooking that morning were, 'I think I am about to change'. In fact she really did change.

"Paralysis in her body and other senses took over. Only her eyes were left to do the talking. I often think that both her eyes whispered, 'This is the transformation that I was waiting for'. Six months later Nannan broke through her cocoon and left us, alighting into the bright blue sky and yonder. The gold sparkle of her wings continue to fall down onto our heads...."

Although the readings were mostly flawless, it was rather hard to sit through the whole program, which dragged on for two hours and forty minutes. Around 20 members of the audience were left at the bitter end, down from around 45 counted at the beginning. They alone braved the lengthiness of some of the stories, made even more tedious by their rendition in two or three languages.

To break the monotony, Katoppo, Sanggarwati, Yatim and Enny Soekamto read out a scene from N. Riantiarno's Women in Parliament. Although they did it well, the play's rowdy, jovial nature did not go particularly well with the elegant mannerisms of the short stories.

Nevertheless, the program was successful in bringing together the rich ASEAN palette of cultures, especially in its use of prose to introduce ASEAN women to each other's heritage. One mystery remained, though: the book Perempuan, which was published by Yayasan Obor ten years ago and which does not contain a single entry from an Indonesian writer (although the foreword was written by Marianne Katoppo), is now out of print and was nowhere to be found.

According to Yatim and fellow-organizer Geni Achnas from the ASEAN Secretariat, no similar anthology was ever published in the ensuing decade. That gives the false impression that female writing in the ASEAN region died in 1988. Whatever went wrong, here's hoping programs such as this will soon rectify this misleading state of affairs.