September, 1998.
In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, there was an excitement of smells in the air, fragrance of endless food stalls, Malay, Chinese, Indian, Other; something new each week, multi-racial, multi-ethnic melting pot transformed in a single generation from small town to international city. Heat from the cooking in the stalls compounded the heat of the equatorial sun, and flames blooming like giant flowers under super-sized woks sent sparks flying up into air rich with exhaust fumes and busy with voices of bustling crowds. Over it all lay a brooding heat and weight of supersaturated air so thick with humidity that the body’s sweat and the moisture of the air were indistinguishably continuous — monsoon time minus three weeks — producing a feverishness, a surreal distortion in the senses, so that beneath the city rushing headlong for the millennium was almost visible the latent image of the small town that had been.
Monsoon coming.
From Monsoon Coming, a novel
Hi, I'm Shymala Dason, a Malaysian-born writer. My work explores the tension of the immigrant experience, from transplant shock and the challenges of changing social class to the chasms of mutual bewilderment that open up beneath the feet of families who find themselves scattered around the world.
Before leaving to focus on writing, I spent ten years on atmospheric science projects at NASA's Lab for Atmospheres and Lab for Extraterrestrial Physics.
“World News Tonight _____, 2008”, Swarthmore Literary Review, Issue 1, Spring 2008; available online at the website.
“All the Necessary Things”, Massachusetts Review Food Matters, Vol. 45, number 3; available online (PDF) at the magazine website.
“Without Anger”, in Topography of War: Asian American Essays (post-9/11 anthology from the Asian American Writers Workshop).
Previous publications include “Harimau”, in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine issue #15 — a magic realism piece set in Malaysia (winner of readers' choice award for that issue).
The mathematics of studying atmospheres on Mars, Titan, or the Earth are very similar; each illuminates the other. The mathematics of the human heart are also similar, whatever the culture, wherever the place, or time. Ten years of working on atmospheric science teams at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and before that degrees in Applied Maths and Physics was unusual but useful preparation for the creation of literary fiction.
The first inkling about yoga came to me from a lady whose name I do not know, because she was the mother of a friend — to a Malaysian kid that meant that her name was “Auntie”. She didn’t move like anybody else’s mother — her bones seemed to be in different places, or possibly elastic. And she approached life with the happiness of a child with a balloon. I thought, “I want some of that.” Being a quick learner, it’s taken me fifteen years of intermittent yoga practice to begin to get a clue as to what she was about, and to begin to know who and what I am.
Middle-eastern dance is good medicine for the twin ills of a sedentary occupation and a tendency to take myself seriously in the wrong way. Improvisational dance, sacred dance, ecstatic dance, are all nonlinear enough to stimulate the right side of the brain, and make words appear on a blank page in more interesting ways than they might otherwise choose to do.
When I first came to this country, I used to take the bus from Bennington, Vermont, where I was in college, to New York city every couple of months, strafe the Indian ethnic neighborhood and Chinatown for basic nutrients such as fish sauce and curry powder, smell up the bus on the way back with all my packages and watch people edge away from me.
One of the delicious ironies of the immigrant experiences is that of a guest in my home telling me, “I don’t like Indian food.” It’s a particularly hard idea to digest, because a Malaysian will eat anything, at least once. And then there’s the cultural protocol question: does one get mad or laugh - or cry?
Namaste!