Kee Thuan Chye: Impassioned, not angry

The anti-establishment writer and thespian defines what drives him.

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“Here, take this,” he said, passing across the table a heavy plastic bag full of books. “You may find these useful. You did say that you didn’t bother to read my previous books.” I took a quick peek into the bag. The slightly pointed comment brought home the thought, not for the first time, that I had perhaps been much too hasty in forming my previous opinion of the grizzled, bespectacled man sitting across me that evening.

In retrospect, I think that I was. The man in question was, of course, local political writer and playwright Kee Thuan Chye, and we were at an Old Town coffee joint in Bandar Utama for a short chat just before the launch of his two new books, Unbelievably Stupid! and Unbelievably Stupid Too!

Kee – or Chye, as he prefers to be called – stuck out quite a bit from the rest of the shop’s few evening patrons. From a cursory glance, he seems to be the kind of person both in and out of place wherever he is. There’s a certain restlessness about the now 61-year-old freelance writer, which may or may not be related to the constant sense of dissatisfaction that runs through his written works.

“Are you sure you didn’t mistake me for someone else?” Chye asked me later. In an article about his books, I called him that “super-educated sounding English speaking man on TV,” the way I remember him as a boy. I said that I had not; my memory of his face on TV is pretty clear, even if it has been awhile ago. “You must have seen me on City of the Rich, not Kopitiam,” he said.

The whole meeting was a new lesson on the folly of judging a book by its cover. A few minutes had barely passed before I realised that I most definitely had to revise my earlier, and very much premature, opinion of Chye. I had opined earlier that he seemed the nice, schoolteacherish sort of person that would not look out of place in front of a classroom. Not so. Chye is animated from the get-go, launching into an impassioned retelling of his decades-old career. He describes the persistent opposition he received for his constant pushing of the envelope during his early days, first as a tutor in Universiti Sains Malaysia, then as literary editor for the Penang-based National Echo, and finally as an editor for the New Straits Times.

“This lecturer barged into my room while I was conducting an interview for some fieldwork assistants,” said Chye about his losing the tutor’s position in USM over an alleged ragging. Chye had apparently been accused by a freshman of having ragged him, the freshman having taken issue over some orders Chye had given him. “I knew he was a lecturer but I didn’t care. You have no bloody right to barge into my room without knocking. I told him off-lah. Next thing I know, I’m being called before a whole tribunal presided over by the vice-chancellor himself.”

Chye explained himself as well as he could, and thought the matter settled until a few days later, when his superior told him that he had to apologise to the vice-chancellor or be let go. “There was no way I was going to apologise to him, since I didn’t do anything to him in the first place.”

He was, of course, summarily let go. The episode perhaps best describes Chye and his anti-authoritarian streak that would play a prominent part in the next few decades of his career. After being sacked from USM, he would go on to make the “biggest mistake of my life” and enter the world of journalism.

“Ironies of life,” he said, chuckling. “I was always pushing the envelope when I was in tNew Straits Times. I got punished a lot of times, even when I was entertainment editor. I was always looking for a lot of issues to discuss, inviting people to write in, for instance, when the New York Philharmonic orchestra was banned from performing in KL.”

The incident in question was in 1984; the New York Philharmonic had cancelled its performance after the Malaysian government had asked that Ernest Bloch’s “Schelomo, a Hebrew Rhapsody for Cello and Orchestra,” be dropped from the tour programme because of the score’s Jewish theme and origins. Chye was then inviting people to write in to the paper and discuss whether the matter should stand, doing so even much later during the controversies that surrounded the infamous erasing of Miss Israel from the live RTM telecast of Miss Universe, and also singer Sudirman’s appearance in a kind of traditional Chinese opera costume for a variety show.

“There was a big controversy over that,” said Chye about the Sudirman issue. “Someone wrote in and asked that there be equal representation of all races in RTM’s entertainment programmes. I ran the letter. It was only fair, wasn’t it? The next day, the whole letter was yanked off the page. I went to see the editor-in-chief. He gave me a one-hour lecture, saying that if he had allowed the letter to be published, there would be blood in the streets. What the hell? Come on, man!” he exclaimed. “A letter asking for equal representation of the races in a variety programme on RTM, and you say there’s going to be blood in the streets? What do you take us for?”

The injury clearly still rankles with Chye. It doesn’t take as much place in his mind, though, as the next few years, after Mahathir Mohamad had swooped into power. According to him, Mahathir was “the one who started the rot”. He has been a heavy and staunch critic of the Malaysian establishment for the past few decades, and it rankles him that Mahathir is now suddenly popular again. The former PM, he maintains, should not be forgotten too quickly for the “mass of filth he dumped on us for decades.”

“It quickly became sharply clear where things were going with Mahathir,” he says sadly, and I get the feeling that this is a sentiment he often gives voice to. “I’ve always been critical of him. I couldn’t get my criticisms expressed and published inNew Straits Times then; so I wrote a play. I wrote 1984 Here and Now. He was Big Brother. And it’s something that millenials and Gen-Ys don’t quite understand when they lionise him. These people are too young to understand what we went through: the culture of fear, the Big Brother-ism. They should be cognisant, take note of all the damage that was done. Mahathir set the foundation for Najib. He is the architect of our downfall. Najib is simply the agent. And he still denies that it was his doing.” Chye laughs as he ends his tirade.

Chye has been a prolific personality over the years, getting his hands into various fields from journalism to theatre and television. “A little unfortunate, don’t you think?” he says. Why so, I ask. “I’ve been kind of a dabbler. It’s better to focus on one field and excel in it, after all. I only got into journalism because I needed the job, to cari makan. My real love is for creative writing and for theatre. Since the early 1980s, I’ve been concentrating on writing political plays.”

It is a sort of anger, I note, that seems to drive him; a tone of anti-establishment anger is present in all his works. He partially disagrees, of course, with my simplistic observation.

“It’s not so much anger as it is passion. How can one not feel impassioned about it? I feel passionate about this country. I always tell people: this is also my home, you know? My forefathers helped to build this. Why am I still considered a tenant? What impassions me is also all the duplicity and deception that has been going on for the last few decades, all beyond excuse.”

Passion, then, best describes his feelings. Next to the still-prominent Patrick Teoh, Chye is possibly one of the last survivors of the old literary vanguard, keeping up his relentless attack on the little injustices that make the news every day.