Your humble servant, this faceless writer of numerous English articles has performed what could easily be described as the unthinkable. Like an American doughnut seller frying char koay teow. Not since the Chinese story telling competition in Primary 3 have I willingly participated in a project that required me to speak perfect, lucid, fluent, perfect, grammatical-error-free, Chinese.
Throughout most of this year, I have been spending a significant amount of my time preparing reports for the said competition. The objective: to build a health product or medicine from any local plant. The limitations placed upon us were that it be an original product, and its mode of application, external.
You may imagine that would be a humongous undertaking. To do what the gigantic pharmaceutical industry does every day every day with the nonchalance of a hungry lumberjack in the forest. We, with an exhaustive supply of research papers, decided to use the guava by sifting through dozens of wide-ranging reports before a cursory description of paste made from the said fruit caught our eye.
Before anyone accuses us of plagiarism, allow me to point out the original report amounted to nothing more than the boiling of fruit juice with the cellulose remnants of the fruit until it attained a gel-like consistency. We took our cue from the slightly exaggerated description of the guava's medicinal properties.
As with any organic substance, heat easily denatures the biological substances within the guava. That was one among many flaws we pointed out in the report which incidentally, didn't provide any empirical data on the effectiveness of the guava derived product as a medical cream.
Countless hours were spent perfecting the processes involved. It began with an ambitious bid to imitate the cream-like substance from the report which inspired us. Unfortunately, we had no expert help in the matter so we pretty much threw various (expensive) substances together with the haphazardness of rats among a hundred different French cheeses. The Internet, gave various details on the steps we needed to take to create a guava cream; and as detailed as the instructions were, we failed to create the light, creamy lotion we hoped to obtain.
This was where Occam's Razor came into play. Instead of creating a terrific product from complex instruction and expensive chemicals in a high school lab with equipment older than the family car; we simplified our steps and curtailed our ambitious pursuits to focus on creating a respectably effective product from high school lab equipment older than the Pentium Celeron.
The product was quickly derived and the report sent between nerve-wrecking exams, concerned parents, worried teachers, and relatively horrible exam results on my part. Not long after the entire melodrama of the first season, the networks renewed our series and we found ourselves in Kuala Lumpur for the finals.
I cursed my bad luck when the call came in telling us we needed to do the entire presentation of our project in Chinese, if we wanted to win. After risking my life by staying up till the wee hours of the morning to get myself stung by Aedes mosquitoes, testing the products on the bumps produced, compiling the English report, and designing the English presentation (which had to be presented using PowerPoint), I didn't find the Chinese language request foisted upon us with the brazen rudeness of Simon Cowell in a gay and lesbian convention singing “You Will Never Walk Alone” as their drunk induced theme very pleasing at all.
After all the public railings (by public, I meant me) against the organizers, the entire presentation was translated and given a face-lift while I attempted to give a credible delivery in a language I have good reason to avoid like a prostitute dressed as a drunken clown.
My team was awfully patient with me. Embarrassment. Supreme, unsurpassed embarrassment is the perfect phrase describing my initial attempts. Finally, on the day we should all be departing for Kuala Lumpur, the teacher and my partners finally teamed up to give me three-to-one voice coaching lessons. The entire morning was not wasted as I finally hit my stride.
I took on the lecturing parlance of a China Central Television (CCTV) and Phoenix TV talk show host. Trust me, it's less embarrassing to to talk like a pretentious, loud oaf than stutter around my materials enough to get me nominated for the Chinese version of Forest Gump.
Friday was a blur of motion, sights, sounds, touch and smell as we rumbled towards KL on one of many commercial buses plying the North-South expressway. Evening traffic jams, taxis and LRTs phased in and out of existence until the final foot powered travel to the First Business Inn. This block of glass and stone, as with many other hotels with ostentatious names, failed to reflect the “First” title bestowed upon it.
It was a two-a-room arrangement in a three by three by three box with lighting that would be as illuminating as Edison's first light bulb. The showers were confusing in their lack of instructions which resulted in two consecutive cold showers at dusk and dawn. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner though not gastronomical art by any lengths of imagination, were delicious and generously served. Considering the entire affair was fully paid for by the event organizers, is was absolutely perfect.
The luck of the draw placed both teams from my school in consecutive order, right before morning tea. Needless to say, we spent all of Friday night and Saturday morning rehearsing our presentation. Nervous wreck wouldn't be the words to describe my state of mind. Silent resignation would be more apt. As with all pessimists, I became more fluent in my part of the presentation the less I thought of my chances of winning.
And by the damnation of fate, somehow I managed to pull it off.
Saturday morning was thereafter irrelevant, and the evening was spent roaming Times Square with my project members. One of whom unexpectedly, turned out to be an avid collector of soft drink bottles and cans. Yes, such a hobby does exist. And according to the animated proprietor of the speciality Coca-Cola store, there are only two such stores in all of Malaysia. And he was the proud owner of both.
Rain poured with the exact intensity of the storms back home in Penang. But somehow, they seem louder in KL. Scientifically speaking, it's probably because of the abundance of concrete, zinc, and aluminium taking the blunt of the raindrops. I prefer to think of it as karma-inspired drumming by the forces of nature.
The evening faded with the heavy rain, and dusk led to the hall of some primary school large enough to fit a aboriginal settlement. There, we feasted among thousands of others upon generous portions of food, water, tea, herbal drinks, herbal vodka, herbal biscuits and herbal sweets. The fact it was organised by the same people behind the Medicinal Plant Discovery Award competition meant the event was peppered with various vendors endorsing diverse products seemingly built out of bizarre uncommon fruit and plant parts. But who would complain when highly competitive vendors despatch overly-friendly ladies in shorts tiny enough to double as underwear.
The results came in. And we, incredulously, won third place. Our juniors won second. Of course, I was probably the only one who felt the essential feelings of disbelief that lend me my personality. I felt our product wasn't really that good. However, the others could not be any happier, which makes me happy for them.
Saturday was driven out of the drains with the pressure of the nights cold to hot shower. Then, a night of celebration by staying up all night with the juniors who had invited some female company. Needless to say, I stayed out of their conversation to concentrated on the go puzzles I have yet to finish even after one year.
The company turned in sometime after 3.00 a.m. Breakfasted at 8, then launched ourselves to Penang. A four hour journey home that was eventful by the artfully carved mountains we passed as we headed North on the expressway. The journey has ended, and we have won something. I suppose I should be satisfied.
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