Because in the end, you don't choose Art. Art chooses you. And Instinct always wins, in the end.
- Wena Poon, USA
This resonates so strongly with me. Wena is a beacon of light for me. We both share such similar predicaments yet she has walked so much further ahead of me. I look to her as an inspiring story. Just very much like the white bearded artist in Central Market telling me to never give up on painting because it took him 5 years selling nothing to reach a point today where he continues to paint his love for nature (and selling handsomely from them).
The struggle of the bohemian, the artist, has been revisited many a time. In between the glossy pages of publications depicting art ware, techniques, themes, written classics, poetry, visual and pop art, dance... Perhaps our challenge by growing up within an Asian / Oriental family structure makes it that more romantically extraordinary.
Although I was the third generation born in the "new" Malaysia, the predominant drive of my grandparents and my parents was to hone a mantra of excellence in academic pursuits. Anything else came second, albeit I was being given the opportunity to learn music and sports. I was the first female of my father's name to enter university. By lord imagine the gongs and trumpets when I graduated! (This was quickly superseded by my younger brother's, which I was glad to be part of the organising committee).
My early writing "career" was a small bud that grew up from the fertile soil of friendships. I began writing with like-minded friends. That was a huge graduation from the tiny fragments of creative sentences that mum had saved from those earlier childhood years. The after school "English language prep-school" that mum religiously sent me to was a fun place to spend my time. Especially since I had just moved to a new town and lost all the comfort of the association I knew through growing up in a small school in a small town. The head master of the prep-school encouraged my mum to send me to England to pursue my love of literature. Now, I was no Dickens fan but I love to play with words and when the year-end examination required a limerick composition including supernatural content... that was purely down my alley! I remembered that afternoon, mum smiled proudly as the head master waxed lyrical but it didn't go beyond than a pat from dad that I did well.
I was still young and naive when I went abroad. Thinking that I could work by sending in articles directly to publishers without really a business case! Although I had loved writing about women rights and development issues that did get published in local community publications. Still, it was such a torrid love affair. I had wasted so many petals by plucking away at the question on whether I should throw myself full heartedly into believing that the pen is indeed mightier than the sword, or should I just wake up and stop being such a deluded girl, and "get a job" like everyone.
Oh I had gone through it all. I had composed, deleted my work because ignorance was bliss, pretended I didn't love writing, I hated painting, I don't really love music after all. My soul never rested one bit and I kept running ahead for years, throwing myself successfully into the corporate world, excelling in my development and traveling afar. Yet my heart continued composing. My head continued filing them away.
You know how it feels to take the first sip of water after a marathon? Painful. Gratifying. That was exactly how I felt when I stopped running and looking over my shoulder while wondering "could I?", "would I?", "how?".
I haven't quite reached getting my stories published but I'm keeping a low profile and ploughing away, honing away at my love. It's as childish as perfecting that bow on the present before you give it to your primary school crush. But at times when I begin to question myself again, I think of Wena, I think of that lovely woman in the writing group I belong to in Adelaide who mentioned that my composition entitled "an afternoon" took her to an exotic place when I thought so little of what inspired me to write that piece - my small fishing home town, that hot humid, putrid smell behind the classroom that I could still recall.
There is no mentor present. Everyone is discouraging. I get only nods of "so you are a writer?" but never beyond, writing was meant for the old drunkard living under the bridge to make ends meet; not as an end in themselves for someone her parents had sacrificed everything to send her to university.
Yet when I stumbled (literally) upon Wena's personal article citing:
"So, to all of you writers and dreamers out there, whether published or unpublished, whether employed or not: remember, Kafka was an insurance salesman. The odds may be stacked against you, and you may have to run away from your gift in order to survive. Your friends, parents, and society may only define success as having a career as a lawyer, a banker, an engineer, a doctor.
But take heart.
Because in the end, you don't choose Art. Art chooses you. And Instinct always wins, in the end."
Poetic assurance.
