Growing Up in Trengannu

[khiemtran]

Recently, I've been reading Growing Up in Trengganu, which was a blog originally and then a best selling book in Malaysia. It's the sort of writing that I love - a rich, nostalgic look at life in Terengganu retold as a series of anecdotes. It seems as though every little detail begets another detail and there's an infectious enthusiasm as the author digresses from one memory to another. It would be easy to think that Kuala Terengannu was a place unusually gifted with layer upon layer of stories, the place you'd love to live one day.

Of course, in all likelihood, there are probably plenty of people who lived in exactly the same Terengannu of old, and who thought it was the most boring backwater imaginable. Which sort of got me thinking.

We probably all know places which glow in our memory like the author's KT glows off the page. Where every little crack and chip held a story and the streets were filled with characters instead of anonymous passers-by. Maybe it will turn out that any place can have such an effect once you hold the right knowledge and look at it through the right eyes. Maybe those places we think of as sterile and soulless are simply that way because we haven't managed to penetrate the surface.

And the treacherous flip-side to that thought, of course, is that maybe the places that we think of as special and soul-filled but unappreciated will turn out to be only special to us (in the same way that, by strange coincidence, everyone in Malaysia seems to have grown up within five kilometres of the best hawker stall in the nation).

It also reminds me of how much I enjoy travelling, especially the joy of slipping under the veil and seeing the depth and the stories behind the scenes. One day I've love to visit Awang Goneng's Terengannu, but I'd also like to be able to visit some of the places I go now and see them with the same depth of vision.

Comments

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I think there are three things necessary for a place to become as vibrant as you say: one, it needs to be the right kind of place inhabited by the right people. I can easily believe that there _are_ places that are dull. Places offering a wide range of experiencences seem to be better candidates for colourful memories than uniform ones.
The second is that you need to be willing to engage with it - if you hate a place, you will not see it from its best side, if you despise the inhabitants and their habits, you won't grow beyond that. And third, you need some of the storyteller's skills in seeing interesting things and being able to relate them, so that others can share, because otherwise, how would we ever know?

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

Seems likely to me that people who don't see anything interesting about the places they know best include some who will set out to write about places which they consider interesting -- and which they don't know.

I don't know how many stories with backgrounds made of lowgrade cardboard result from this, and how many from "Oh, New York editors don't want stories which aren't set in New York City." (Substitute "London" etc. where needed.)