Clutter

Recently, I’ve been worried about one of my students, a Form 4 boy that I work closely with as part of my social entrepreneurship team. I found out that, as the lead in the BM drama production, he’s been practicing with the team from 8 pm to 10 pm almost every night, and even longer on weekends. This is on top of his regular prefect duties – which may be more than other prefects’, since he’s been tapped to become head prefect – and his academic responsibilities as one of the top students in Form 4, not to mention his role as team leader in our social entrepreneurship project. And now that all of the students are in exams, those long, late-night practices seem even more absurd. I’ve often wondered why he doesn’t ask to be excused from drama, at least for one or two days out of the week. Even with the drama competition looming, the students’ first priority should be their academics.

An interaction on the group chat a few weeks ago. And it hasn’t gotten better since then.

I complained to a fellow SETA that this boy was just really bad at saying no. She made a comment about students reflecting their ETAs. My instinct was to deny it – this kid was much too nice and cooperative of a person to be anything like me.

But then I thought back. Once, I stood out in the blazing sun for two hours in a wedding dress, just because some teachers had asked me to participate in a mascot parade. Once, I edited 21 Form 5 students’ exchange program personal statements for a month, then skipped classes for three hours in the last week so that I could scan all of their applications. Once, I spent one and a half weeks preparing with the debate team, making them snacks and staying at school for over ten hours each day.

When “once” happens so many times, it ceases to become a one-time occurrence, and becomes a pattern.

My student and I are both bad at saying no. Even when we know it’s not a good idea, like when he’s asked to skip extra class, during exams, in favor of drama practice, or when I’m asked to write a two-page poem the same weekend that I’m hosting an English camp, we still say yes. And then we pay the price.

#same

I wonder why this student chooses to do so much, when being slightly less busy would not make anyone think less of him. I think he just wants to be included, to be needed. Maybe he craves the feeling of being an indispensable part of a whole. Maybe he’s worried about what kind of thoughts might enter his head, should he have too much time to sit and think by himself. Or maybe I’m just projecting.

I have to admit that I’ve enjoyed staying busy. When I pack every day to the bursting point, I return home feeling exhausted but happy, satisfied with how much progress I am making with my students. But I also worry about myself. I worry about how I can’t seem to return to a normal sleep schedule, despite how tired I am all the time. I worry about how I eat greasy, fried takeout instead of expending the effort to make a healthy meal at home. I worry about all the emails from my mother. “How are you? I haven’t heard from you in a long time, please call me.” “Your grandma has been asking about you. Can you call her when you have time?” “Have you called your grandma yet?”

I worry about the resentment that always seems so close to the surface these days. I used to be made up of gentle, forgiving curves, but now I feel jagged and brittle. Everything bothers me.

The way that students assume that I have unlimited free time to spend with them, and then grow angry when I tell them that I have too much work. As though I am a playmate, or perhaps a plaything, rather than an adult with responsibilities.

The way that, even in my second year, people still ask me the same questions.
Looking down at my plate: “Oh! You take rice??”
Watching me spoon sambal onto my vegetables: “You like spicy?”
Peering at my face: “Why you look Chinese?” Always, always, always this question.

The way my work is not taken seriously, because I am not a “serious teacher.” I am the “fun” teacher, the one who brings her guitar to class, who plays games that involve a lot of screaming and laughter. So students don’t listen when I ask them to sit down and try writing a poem for once. They complain, “Teacher, so hard,” with their pencils lying untouched on their desks. They moan and loll their heads sideways and clamor for a song. And when I pack up their quarter-finished poems and prepare to leave, they ask hopefully, “Next week, singing?”

The way that people marvel at the way my roommate speaks BM, but assume that, despite having lived here for over a year, I don’t understand when they gossip about me behind my back, or sometimes right in front of my face. The male teachers mutter, “Dia malu, juga tak paham Bahasa Melayu” as I pass by, and it’s only in my head that I say, “Ya, saya malu, tapi saya paham Bahasa Melayu, kerana saya tak bodoh.” Optional add-on: “You assholes.”

When I first began writing this post, I thought these feelings were signs of burnout. But now I realize it was a misdiagnosis. Burnout would leave me feeling apathetic and unable to see the point in attending school. I don’t feel that way. I’m still excited to see the majority of my students, and planning for future events is still satisfying work. But I’ve found that I’ve taken on too heavy a workload at school, and as a result, the other parts of my life suffer.

Just over a week ago, my room was an absolute mess. There were dirty clothes and rumpled sheets overflowing the laundry basket, countless empty plastic bottles around my desk, a too-full trash can next to my bed. Swirled into the bathroom drain was a hairball roughly the size of my fist. Loose papers, limned with dust, fluttered weakly on the floor whenever I turned on the fan. It was a good enough reflection for the state of my mind: I’d been too busy that week, too busy for the past month, to sit down and clean up all the clutter.

My life has been full of clutter. There’s my room, and then there’s the kitchen sink, stacked with dishes that I avoid looking at because I’m just too tired to take care of them. There’s the kitchen trashcan, packed to bursting with take-out containers to replace the meals I’ve grown too busy to cook. There’s my purse, where I keep finding old receipts, empty candy wrappers, and hoarded napkins from weeks ago. There’s my body, feeling heavy and lopsided with stress, lumpy and distorted in the mirror. There’s my mind, flooded with worries that chase each other in circles, keeping me up late into the night.

It’s nothing unfamiliar, but it’s still hard to look at all of this disorder. It’s hard to admit that I have not made time for myself amidst everything else that is going on, when I know that a lack of self-care causes me to internalize stress and become ill. It’s one of the reasons that I haven’t been able to complete a new blog post until now. I have hundreds of tales about my students and the quirky things they do, but the truth is that I also spend a lot of time lying in my bed with the lights off, trying to summon up the willpower to leave my room.

Right now, there are eighteen drafts in my unpublished posts. Eighteen drafts, far more than eighteen times that I tried to write something and could not finish. Countless times I tried to tie all of my stories, bursting at the seams with complicated feelings and hidden meanings, into a neat little package to send off into the world. But it’s like trying to close an overstuffed suitcase. I keep pulling things out, arranging them this way and that, discarding unnecessary parts and pinching others smaller to fit into tight corners. But I keep discovering new things when I do that. Everything builds on top of everything else, expanding out of control, and I’m left bewildered in its wake.

I am writing this mostly for myself, as a way to clean up my thoughts, even as I work on cleaning up my room. I am trying to get back to some kind of balance. I am trying to focus on the small, bright moments of each day, rather than the stressful thoughts that stomp insistently around my head.

I measure out laundry detergent and think about my mentor, writing a cute note of encouragement to me when she noticed my frustration one day. “What is the word,” she asked me, as I sat fuming at my desk, “for the sound that bears make?”

“Um,” I said. “Roaring, I guess?”

“Oh, okay.” Moments later, she dropped a note on my desk with a “Ta-dah!” sound.

I especially enjoy the fact that she wrote desserts, plural. All the desserts, please.

I pile dripping dishes on the dish rack and remember one of my boys telling me a pickup line. “Teacher,” he said, bobbing slightly on the spot. “Do you have a ladder? Because I want to climb up into your heart.”

I squinted at him. “Where did you learn that?” I demanded. “From your new friend Adib?”

He blinked large, slightly protuberant eyes at me. “I learned it from Mr. Zach,” he said, naming another ETA.

“Don’t learn too much from him,” I warned him sternly. I was still laughing. “He is a bad, bad man.”

I sweep dust and hair from the floor and recall a conversation I had with one of my favorite students. I confessed that it bothers me when my own students ask to hang out with me, and then constantly demand to see my roommate. It makes me feel as though they’re just using me as a springboard to meet the white, “real American” ETA. My student had this to say:

I can’t say that I’m completely restored to perfect and shiny newness – there’s no way for that to happen, barring a complete memory wipe of the past year and a half. I still get stressed out. I can still experience all extremes of the emotional spectrum in one day. I still have bad moments, bad days, and sometimes I will have bad weeks. But I am learning to cope with the downswings. I am learning to clean up my messes, both physical and emotional. And eventually, I hope I will learn how to say no when it really counts, and learn not to feel guilty for taking time to myself.

In the meantime, enjoy a few snapshots of what I’ve been up to for the past month.

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And don’t think I’ve forgotten about that very busy student. I just learned (literally about an hour ago) that the BM drama team SWEPT the district competition. First place overall, best actor, and best director. All that hard work paid off! And now I hope he can settle down to his exams and take care of himself as well.

And then he’s all humble about it. Of all the nerve.

A Moment Away

(Students’ names have been changed.)

On Saturday, I wake up at 7 am and drive forty-five minutes to Kuala Berang with my mentor, Ain. She makes early morning conversation, telling me about ghosts, about how they tend to attack those most susceptible to fear and sadness. “So, you have to be careful. You can’t be too afraid or too sad.”

I think about one of my students, who told me that her sister-in-law has days when she just lies in bed and cries for hours on end, because the ghosts affect her so badly. Privately, I wonder if ghosts are how my community explains mental illnesses like schizophrenia and depression, Western names given to what my dad might call “American diseases.”

My sleep-fogged brain moves slowly; before I can ride this train of thought any further, Ain interrupts, glancing sidelong at me. “Do people in America believe in ghosts?” she asks.

“It depends who you talk to,” I say, which is the simplest answer. I don’t tell her that I think America, with its rich history of violence, probably has more than a few spirits hanging around.

We arrive at the campsite, and the solemn mood cast by our ghost-talk evaporates in the blinding sunlight. We go hiking (“jungle trekking,” as the Malaysians call it) alongside the students, scrabbling for footholds in the soft, leaf-strewn earth. I grasp onto the trunks of slender saplings whenever I can, not trusting my own balance; my students are careful to warn me when a tree has thorns, but I end up pricking myself a few times anyway. My breath soon comes short. Na—-, the form 3 girl walking ahead of me, helps me up steep inclines and across large gaps. “Okay?” she asks, whenever she hears me slip – which is embarrassingly often.

N—, who is in form 2 and recently transferred from Selangor, follows behind me and keeps up a steady stream of conversation. We both envy Na—-, who seems to find the hike easy. “She’s an athlete,” N— points out resignedly. To distract ourselves from the pain of the trek, we talk about food. N— tells me she loves macaroni and cheese, and reacts with horror when I wrinkle my nose at her. “You don’t like cheese??” I shake my head, laughing, and tell her that she can take my share of cheese anytime she wants.

The older boys crash headlong past us, paying little heed to the trail we’re following. “Shortcut!” one of them shouts at me, narrowly avoiding slamming into a tree. I stare down the sharp downhill slope.

“This is where I die,” I announce, mostly to myself.

“You won’t die here,” N— says behind me. One of her small hands presses gently between my shoulder blades. “Just go slowly.”

In the afternoon, after everyone has eaten and showered and prayed, the students go on a treasure hunt. Ain and I leave the other teachers in the shade and wander through the campgrounds. The sun beats down on us. I wipe sweat from my upper lip and watch a group of students run by; I wonder, certainly not for the first time, where they manage to get all their energy.

As we wander along, eating ears of boiled corn another teacher had given to us (random, I know), Ain points out the various fruits that grow around the campsite. Students hail us as we pass a playground, and we pause for a few minutes to sit on the swings, which creak alarmingly under our weight. Ain seems to enjoy the sight of a small artificial lake, its waters placid in the still afternoon air, though all my cynical mind can think of is how this must be a massive breeding ground for mosquitos.

We pass by the ostrich pen. The birds take no real notice of us, preferring instead to search for bugs in the grass. Ain stares, fascinated, at an ostrich that keeps pecking at the gate. “What is it doing?” she asks.

“There’s probably lots of bugs on the other side,” I guess, slightly disconcerted by the bird’s eyes. They are large and limpid, fringed with lashes so thick and dark they look mascaraed.

We head back to camp with some of the students, who look sweaty and disgruntled at having been out in the heat so long.

“So tired,” one of them complains.

“I hate this,” another tells me frankly. But they all liven up when I point the camera at them.

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As the sun begins to set, the students start cooking dinner, and preparing for group performances later that night. Ain leaves to check on some of her students; not wanting to trail behind her like a lost puppy, I wander around the campsite. A student, tending a wok full of hissing oil, offers me a golden piece of fried dough. “Jemput,” she says, when I ask what it is called. It is sweet and warm, and leaves grease in the corners of my lips.

One boy, a grin splitting his face, approaches me with a large piece of watermelon. Though I know the answer already, I ask him what it is called in BM. “Tembikai,” he says. “But in Terengganu, timun cina.” He takes a bite and bobs his head up and down. “Sweet, so sweet.”

“Yes, manis leting,” I agree, displaying the tiny bit of ‘Ganu slang I do know, and he just about falls over from surprise. When I leave him, he’s cackling and shouting “Manis leting!” to his friends.

The girl scouts ask me to help them with their performance, and I find myself sitting in the middle of their campsite, cross-legged on a prayer mat, holding a borrowed guitar and trying to figure out the chords to “Love Yourself.” N— sings in a clear, even alto, demonstrating a hitherto unexpected level of musicianship. I listen to her with one ear and to the guitar with other, adjusting my rhythms to fit the pattern of her breath. Even when the other girls begin clapping, their tempo out of sync with ours, we aren’t pulled down by their inconsistent beat. We stay on course, reading and responding to one another. It feels easy and familiar. It feels right…at least until the high E-string pops.

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Night falls. I grill chicken with the teachers and listen to my students praying in the open hall nearby. The sound of their voices, humming in devoted unison, is deep and resonant as music. The smoky, chicken-scented air around me ripples with it. I close my eyes. Amin.

The student performances make the hall ring with laughter, and I’m struck anew by how creative my students can be, when they’re not shackled by an unfamiliar language. Afterwards, I sit with A—-, one of my form 4 boys, who holds a borrowed ukulele. He fingerpicks a few sequences with fluent ease. I glance sidelong at him; I’ve known since last year that A—- could play ukulele, but I didn’t know that he was this good. “Where did you learn how to play?”

“My brother,” he says shyly. “But…he’s a ukulele genius. I’m just okay.”

I scowl a little at him. “You’re much better than ‘just okay,'” I tell him. He looks both embarrassed and pleased.

It is easy to feel comfortable with quiet and unassuming A—-, who curls around the ukulele, brow furrowed in deep concentration and fingers searching for the right chords. Maybe it’s the way that he, like N—, does not need me to lead him. He plays, and I sing. It reminds me of long afternoons in high school, spent rehearsing in my friend’s living room, plonking away at an old upright piano and eating mandu when we got hungry. A—- offers me a small smile. I try not to betray how excited I am to have found not one, but two musicians in one night.

“Wow,” says Ain, appearing with a plate full of chicken. She offers me some. “Eat.” Having not eaten dinner, I immediately accept. “You too, A—-,” Ain orders, but A—- shakes his head. He continues to pluck away at the ukulele, singing quietly under his breath. When the ukulele goes out of tune, I tune it one-handed for him. My other hand is covered in spicy sauce.

Later, after I’ve rinsed my hands, I get to hold a baby rabbit. He sits very still in my hands, nibbling gently at my palms, maybe tasting the remnants of chicken sauce (there was no soap by the sinks). I stroke his fur, which feels like loose cotton stuffing. “I miss my dog,” I moan to the students sitting next to me. As if understanding this, the bunny hops out of my grip. The students squeal and we run to catch him.

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My days here are full and bright in a way that’s hard to contain in writing. I have poured out thousands and thousands of words; they are all honest and all true, but none of them feel quite complete. Even this feels incomplete, because it’s only one chapter in a still-ongoing story. The relationships that I cultivated during this camp – with Ain, with N—, with A—-, with the countless other unnamed students whose stories do not quite fit into this post’s narrative, but who are no less important – are still unfolding. I find something new in them every day, and I try to capture those small, shining moments.

When my life is slightly more quiet and I am not rattling excitedly from one thing to the next, I sit down and string those moments together, searching for the story that links them all. It’s as much for my benefit as it is for anyone else’s, because it reminds me that as bogged down as I become by small daily frustrations and indignities, there is still so much to be grateful for. No day is ever exactly the same. I am never left without some kind of story to tell, and for me, that’s the most satisfying part about being here.