He’s here!!!

Last Monday, he was here…Kee Thuan Chye..It was such a great experience to meet him as a successful English writer in Malaysia and Dr. Edwin had tried his best to bring him to us. We had a meeting about 2hours and firstly he shared his experiences and he had been a journalist now for 28 years. His experiences started when he said that in fact, he was not thinking of going to university because of the expense. So, after Form 6, he took a job at MAS, and it lasted for two days. Later, he furthered his studies in USM and he had become enamoured of the theatre after doing a lot of work at the Experimental Theatre. Then, he wrote his own plays and directed them, and that became his passion. In the meeting he talked much about his play; Swordfish and the Concubine and had asked us about the play. It was such a good play because he was able to combine the elements of traditional and modern into that play and present it in his own way. The play completed in different way from others writers as he portrayed the humour and messages in one time. In this semester, we were studying this play and really hope that his brief explanations about it will help us better in our final on next week. He also talked about his books and certain of his works were based on the true scenarios in Malaysia. From the meeting I can simply said that he had shown to us that whether it was English literature or any kind of literature, it was important to have an appreciation of it because literature deals with life, it deals with a lot of moral issues, it deals with how people live, how they behave in certain situations. And although literary works may be fictive, or fictional, there was a certain truth to them. And, as we read them, we empathise with the characters. We go through the journey that they go through and we hopefully, understand something about life from their experience.