Mukhsin - A Yasmin Ahmad film

Ballad of a single chopstick.
























Watching Mukhsin, a new film by Malaysian filmmaker Yasmin Ahmad, has fired pelts of ricocheting childhood memories inside me, figments of my past which I thought I have long since let slip. Instead of posting my thoughts about the movie (which I may do so eventually or may already be doing so), I will first like to share with all, some resurrected jigsaws of my past. I shall try to reconstruct the lost pieces as best I can, now.

I have a childhood playmate in my pre-teen days, my cousin from my father's side. She is one year my elder. My cousin comes from a family of six siblings (five daughters and a son) and she is the youngest. Her father drove taxis back in those days to feed his big family. Her mother committed suicide by jumping off their ninth storey apartment building after my cousin’s birth. But enough about her family background. She was my holiday playmate, my companion, and I liked having her around, a lot.

Twice a year, during the school holidays, my cousin would come stay with us. We were like a pair of chopsticks whenever she visited. We would eat together, play together, and sleep like contented babies together. We were inseparable. In between meals, we would roam around our stomping grounds, having fun in the sun, gleefully escaping into our own little world of whimsy and make-believe. We liked playing games with other kids or re-enacting stuff we watched on the telly. We liked catching spiders in shrubs and when thirsty, sucking on dripping ice cream sticks. We enjoyed the outdoor stations of playgrounds as much as stashing ourselves inside their nooks and crevices, having a breather while talking about nonsense or “serious” things. Once we were done resting, we would try constructing skyscrapers or fantastical creatures out of whatever materials we can find in and around the sandlots. (Playgrounds were much more fun in those days, because you could actually get hurt falling down, rubbing exposed skins violently against rough gravel-like sand. That, and the fact that there was actually sand back then to play around in and get dirty with. Those were the days…). In other words, my cousin and school holidays went together like peas and carrots. Having her around, the holidays were always too short, and the wait for the next one was always too long.

My cousin was a sickly child. Besides gawking at her sweat soaked sheets on some nights, I would not have guessed the girl went in and out of hospitals very often back then. "…Ah di ah, don't you tire out ah mei huh, or I spank your behind then you know!" or so I had often been told by older relations (my family nick was ah di, which literally meant little brother. Ah mei is Hokkien for little sister. Our charming monikers made sense since both of us were youngest in our respective families). Anyway, that girl could outrun me anytime, as I was not exactly an energizer bunny back then, but that would be another story altogether... Thing is, I felt happy and contented that there would always be this other little person who enjoys wasting time with me, that there would be someone who could share my perspectives on ice cream, the sound of crickets, doubling homemade blankets as superhero capes, and arguing over the right amount of water to use for the best sandy construction. Kids need companionship too, I guess.

However, there was something about this girl that confounded my unformed little mind. She would sometimes say things I found too hard to comprehend. Like, "You should be thankful both your parents are still alive, you know?" or "You should try to be more caring towards our granny, understand?" I don't know, and I don't understand. Anyway, I hardly gave a thought to these mild “lectures,” for I only wanted to play and play around some more. Personally, I did not and could not understand her burgeoning desires to outgrow her childhood and become an adult, a woman. What I did understand and could not forget was the day she went away…

In case you are wondering, she did not die.

It was our last day together during the December holidays, I was 11, she was 12. The sun was blazing hot and so we took a break underneath a play "cave." I can't exactly remember the kinds of conversations we had, but in between her “lectures,” the words we exchanged would usually revolve around the food we had eaten, and the meals we were going to eat, the games we played or were going to play, and the time we should get back home before any random adult spankmaster decided to whoop our behinds. It was in the midst of this usual stream of mindless conversations that the girl dropped the bombshell - she told me that from next year onwards, she would want to find part-time jobs to help her family out in whatever ways she can. And just like that, she stopped coming over. The peas and carrots were separated. This chopstick had lost a playmate. A chapter of my life had reached its end...

I did not die either.

Fast forward. My cousin got a job (as a sales girl) eventually. She opted out of continuing her studies after her 'N’ levels to work full time in a factory. She met her husband-to-be in the same workplace. They got married, gave birth to three children (at last count), and she is now a happy stay-home mom. Besides the usual annual pleasantries exchanged during the past twenty Chinese New Year get-togethers, we hardly speak to each other anymore. We have grown up and grown apart. Yes, life turned out good for my childhood playmate, as it turned out fine for me too, I guess. I bluffed my way through my studies, got in and out of the civil service, succeeded in eking out a modest living in the private sector, and failed miserably at a couple of relationships. I have been through no weddings and two funerals (my grandma and my dad) so far. Nowadays, I spend my time working, eating, going out with friends, surfing for porn and escaping into the vast wondrous world of movies. The usual stuff a single 30-year-old bloke does, I hope. In retrospect, I think I may still be that 11-year-old boy, but I am not fretting over it. Life always works itself out, so I firmly believe. Or do I?

With all said and done, what I am most fascinated by, in fact, is the concept of memories and the part they play in recollecting our past, and - more intoxicatingly so - our childhoods. Those were the days when we still believed in magic and knew no limits. We still loved and hated people but would just as easily forget about them the next minute. In a world where bigger, taller people told us what to do day in day out, we would naturally cling on to people our own size, share in the wondrous worlds we conjured up, and slip in and out of them willingly. I hence marvel at the way our perspectives on things - love, life and everything else - shift, as we grow up and leave the wonder of our innocence behind. It is intriguing that the point where this innocence is lost varies from person to person, even though we might have started at the same point once.

Life is a mysterious thing, more intriguing than any movie out there. To me, its innate philosophy (if it can even be called a philosophy) is simply this - if it isn’t this, then it’s something else. We are constantly shoved into a new crossroad, with paths that lead us to places we don’t know, with horizons that get murkier by the minute. Our choices may often be half-chances, but I think the routes we have taken are never wasted, for even a road less traveled can be used in consideration for our journeys ahead. This may also be where art, like movies, books, music and so on, comes in. And since I am a film geek, shall just talk about cinema then.

Great film art resonates emotionally because it has an uncanny understanding of genuine feelings. It intuitively evokes them. As they are effectively an audio-visual document of temporality, film has also become an intriguing tool for the human studies of time, memories and their associative impacts on our consciousness of these phenomenons. As such, film encourages us, its respondents, to rekindle our respective search into the dark side of our souls, a realm where we cumulatively dump or hide away (by habit, necessity, defenses or sheer desperation), the good and bad things we might have lost along the way.

As such, I am always thankful for films like Mukhsin, because via their unassuming plays on these 24 frames per second, the sublime truths within will gently reveal themselves. In parts, I enjoyed Mukhsin’s encapsulating moments of the courtships between the two protagonists. Isolated from the others, they are set adrift in a feverish bubble of first love, stirring up exquisite bursts of bittersweet bliss that bewilder and intoxicate. In sum, I respond to the palpable sense of place and time establishing the boy, his girl and everyone they knew. The vastness of the green paddy fields and the clear blue sky, the soaring flight of a homemade kite, the antics of naughty pets and peripheral personalities, all of which form a verisimilitudinally rich tapestry of Mukhsin’s universe. These captivating markers of one’s fading memories cushion my walk. They allow me the breathing space to use this film as a mirror, to coax out a purer reflection of my inner self, which I thought had long been decimated by the realities of innocence lost. With Mukhsin, I get to experientially and contemplatively glimpse, albeit fleetingly, into a bygone joyous time of innocence regained.

It has made the chopsticks whole again.