Victor Chin

At wherever your soul may be there will be people who will remember you and your family and love ones. There will always be those who will remember your work (though cut short by you sudden unexplained death) and will continue where you have left off.

You will always be one of the many true sons (past, present & future) of Malaysia.

Some mornings, my breakfast is a simple bowl of home made peanut and dried oysters porridge, cooked over night in a slow cooker, with a sprinkling of chopped fresh spring onions and coriander. A small port of Chinese tea.

My son, Seenum, would have gone to school after his own breakfast. My wife, Numpueng, drives him to his near by kinder garden. She usually have her own choice of food in the morning which she’ll pick up on the way back home. We would eat together occasionally.

On days like this, there is a sense of happiness and serenity, otherwise, there is usually a feeling of anxiety. I am often filled with mortal concerns. How long can I continue to take care of my family and myself? How shall I live? What have I done with the life given to me? How can I have a clarity of mind?

How much do I know of the art of living?

Chua Cheng Chye

Our teacher/headmaster/scout master/boys brigade captain/choir master/church leader/church youth counsellor/ friend etc. Mr. Chua CC passed away in 2008. Since then  many old boys and friends who knew him have got together to honour him and they have put the ChuaCC Fund in memory of him and his work,love and generosity of spirit. Read more…

Bo-Yuen painting in his studio.

APRIL 14 — There are quite a few festivals that fall in April. For the Chinese community, there’s the annual Ts’ing-ming when they visit the graves in honour of their ancestors.

For the Christians they observe Good Friday and Easter, the death and rebirth of their saviour Jesus Christ. And the Thais who live here celebrate Songkran, the annual water festival signalling their lunar New Year.

It is in this mixed mood of death and birth that I write about two nonagenarian Malaysian artists. The venerable Bo-Yeun, 96, passed away this week and Fung Yow Chork, 91, is critically ill in hospital (I shall write about him in another article).

In the early years, there were two well-known artists/monks in Penang. One was the late venerable Chuk Mor from the Triple Wisdom Temple and the other was Bo-Yeun from the Kek Lok Si  temple. After many years, Bo-Yuen left Penang in 1961 to set up the Hu-Bin Vihara in Petaling Jaya.

They were among the first batch of young monks who migrated from Fujian, China, to serve in the local temples. Their passing marks the end of that line of descendants from China.

Read more…

The ability to understand someone else’s feelings as if they were one’s own is not something we do easily and often. It is demanding and thankless. Perhaps that may explain why most of us are mainly concerned with the needs our own self and those of our immediate family. How others feel is hardly our interest. How about considering some empathy?

My exhibition of photos Empathy at KLPac closed on the 8 March. This third collection of images of people with disability doing their own thing in sports and in work, was on display for 7 weeks. During that time there were several write ups about the exhibition and one of the portraits of Siti Aishah made it to the front page of the Sunday People in the NST’s Sunday Times.

This media coverage of the disabled group gave all those people in this small and fragile community a much needed visual profile which they seldom get. The Star newspaper’s writer Tan Karr Wei also wrote about the portraitures with understanding.

Then there was Elaine Lau from the Option of the Edge who also gave a voice to this often voiceless fellow citizens. Ng Suzhen from the Malay Mail was the first to put this story in her CyberSpot page. The Chinese press too especially the writer Chee Nyuk Yan from Nanyang Siang Pau gave this group a center spread in their Sunday edition and this was followed by Sin Chew Daily‘s reporter Ten Yien Hsia’s news of the event. I was also invited to talk about the exhibition on TV3′s Malaysia Hari Ini morning magazine show.

After all the effort of first going out to get the cooperation of all my disabled friends to allow me to photograph them, and then to mount and promote the visibility of the subject to a larger public, it had dawn on me that this project of promoting a little more empathy for others, has been all a group effort by everyone who has been involved. This is also a note of thanks to all of you. Now I am beginning to understand.