Point of No Return

Beth Yahp was reading from a work in progress at Universiti Malaya this evening. Just a small group, not amounting to a crowd, made it over there. The rain belting down outside didn't help.

Beth talked about how the story Point of No Return came to be written.

Last year, she returned to Malaysia after 20 years away, and saw a country which embraced modernity and westernisation, with huge development projects, and a new rhetoric of openness and anti-corruption with its new Prime Minister. On the surface, there seemed to be widespread hopefulness.

However, reading the newspapers she saw that there was a darker undercurrent. Whole pages of rape reports and high profile murder cases, as if "the media was feeding on a lurid collective psychosis".

While the men involved in these cases (ranging from young boys to grandfathers) were presented as anomolies, she says, the burden of guilt appeared to be onto the female victims: with questions asked about the way a woman dressed, or whether she had been sexually active.

Beth cited two articles which had particularly sparked her imagination. The first was an article which appeared in The Sunday Times: Vice and Virginity by Sulaiman Dufford (Feb 8th 2004) which talked about the pressures of modern life on young people and suggested that because of Malaysia's strong culture of virginity, because hormones were raging more than ever at age 18-19, and because it made economic sense, young people should be encouraged to marry in their late teen years.

The other was a Dear Doctor column which appeared in Berita Harian where a young wifer wrote in to ask for advice on dealing with her husband's premature ejaculation (the "point of no return" of the story's title). The letter was answered in an extremely detailed and open way - surprising in a society where sex is little talked about in public. (But we see these contradictions all the time, don't we? The Gardner & Wife letter I pasted up the other day also illustrates this nicely.)

So Beth's story deals with teenage sex, a topic generally swept under the carpet, frankly and head on. She read a longish extract - beautifully crafted - of the story in progress which she says keeps growing.

A relevant story. A story about issues which people in Malaysia really face. A story which will for sure stir debate.

And that's what great writing is all about.