Because Lydia Teh is a fellow Klangite (Klang is a town located just outside Kuala Lumpur, the capital city of Malaysia), I have no problems shelling out thirty dollars in local currency for her collection of anecdotes Life's Like That, subtitled rather grandiosely Scenes From Malaysian Life. Ms Teh isn't writing about Malaysian life as much as her own life as a housewife and mother of four children along with her observations of how things are around her, so the subtitle is quite misleading in a way.

Filled with anecdotes about motherhood, her likes and dislikes, as well as the antics of her children and pets, this tome compiles articles the author has written previously for newspapers The Star, New Straits Times, and the website e-homemakers.net. Maybe I'm spoiled by Datuk Marina Mahathir's In Liberal Doses, where the daughter of the former Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad attacked the right-wing fundemantalists and the more idiotic actions of her father's government with great wit, humor, common sense, and passion, but I open Life's Like That expecting something that is a little more than fluffy and harmless anecdotes. I am looking for just a little social commentary, some satire, or at least some even a little hard-hitting articles that reveal a little about Ms Teh's views on Malaysia. Alas, instead all I get are happy children, silly doggies, and the obvious targets like litterbugs that won't cause Ms Teh to be secreted into a deserted island by the Internal Security Act.

Not that the anecdotes aren't entertaining. Some are - the article about cinemas in Malaysia in the 1970s bring back fond memories, for example, as does the article about what Chinese women who have recently delivered a baby have to endure under the tyranny of traditionalist mothers. Ms Teh is a typical Chinese woman in Malaysia in that one can find many Chinese women in Malaysia who have the same routine, life experiences, and stories to tell, so I'm sure I'm not the only one who nods my head to some of Ms Teh's observations of motherhood and life as a housewife.

The thing is, this book can be a frustrating read because Ms Teh, alas like a typical Malaysian writer in the public medium, also holds herself too much from the reader. She obviously skirts around issues that can be volatile while taking care to emphasize at regular intervals that she is assuredly a law-abiding upright citizen. I don't blame her, really. In Malaysia, the government controls the media in the sense that the government reviews and renews the licenses of these public media in monthly intervals. That means, anyone who offends Big Brother will be put out of operation with extreme prejudice. Many people who make social commentaries have long learned to dance along the political line. Ms Teh doing the same is simply good sense on her part, especially when she has no strong political agendas to sell in her writing. But nonetheless, it becomes frustrating when Ms Teh pulls back her claws so much that her article on the wet market, for example, is so simplistic and dumbed down that it could have easily come from a comprehension text in a Primary Three workbook.

When Ms Teh exhibits some wit, mostly in the later articles concerning TV (the one on subtitles is too funny), she is at her element as she has me in stitches at times. Unfortunately, I am also frustrated because I can't help wishing that she hasn't held herself back so many times in this book. Oh, not to nitpick too much, Ms Teh, but Nikita of the TV series La Femme Nikita is in love with Michael who, however, is not the head of Section One. That would be Operations. Sigh, that show was so cool when Nikita wasn't a stupid whiny bimbo and things weren't so 'Shippy.

Anyway, back to the book, the author also displays a very Malaysian trait in that she has no reservations about going all the way in toilet humor. I don't think I need to read about how she pinches her kids' pimples and "if it's watery, it will shoot out water-pistol like; if it's dry, it will squirt like toothpaste being squeezed out of the tube", much less an entire article devoted to that topic. And don't get me started about that article all about the different ways people read or don't read while sitting or squatting in the toilet. I make the mistake of eating while reading through that article so... ugh. Or that one about her kids' toilet training mishaps. Or that one about durians where she talks about the toilets stinking up after a durian eater's happy visit. I am trying to eat, for heaven's sake! It is a nice tall glass of chocolate sundae and a thick piece of tiramisu! It costs me twenty-seven bucks (the waiter assures me that they use high quality chocolate powder and what-not to make these thingies and I assume by "high quality" they mean fine gold and diamond powder).

I confess that I don't really get the articles on motherhood. Okay, a little personal confession: hubby and I were so busy being researchers with delusions of saving the world back then that we didn't have the energy to push our kids through ballet, piano, or art classes most typical Chinese Malaysian parents seem to believe that their children must take. We would just tell them that if they want to dance, sing, paint, whatever, just tell Mommy and Daddy and it will be done, as long as it doesn't involve selling their troublesome siblings away or the expensive toys they have seen advertized on TV. When our kids were nearing adolescence and we started having visions of monster teenagers making life difficult for everyone, I asked my husband whether we have made an awful mistake by not pushing our kids through ballet, piano, art, Chinese language, Sunday school, or other classes their friends are going to. We seemed so different from other parents, we were worried that we were somehow being too negligent, our kids would think we didn't care about them, et cetera, that it was a relief when the kids didn't turn out to be ambition-free hippies or worse. Ms Teh's parenting experience is a complete 180 from mine and probably a little too textbook-perfect for cynical old me.

"Textbook-perfect" is the biggest problem of Life's Like That: it presents a highly romanticized Malaysian Brady Bunch-like depiction of Malaysian suburbia that prevents this book from having any value beyond an easily-read, mildy diverting read in between transit flights. Even a compilation of Reader's Digest feels more genuine than this book. Not that I am saying that Ms Teh is not genuine in any way, please let us be clear on this, what I am saying is that the writing is such that the wit is too tentative, the barbs lack accuracy or even a focus, and it is too clear that the author is being very careful and very guarded about not wanting to offend anyone in her writing. I know, in Malaysia people are too easily offended and the repercussions can be severe. Marina Mahathir gets away with it because she is the daughter of you-know-know. People like Ms Teh can't. I don't expect her to risk being dragged away in the middle of the night by the cops on charges of sodomy involving a hysterical chauffeur (sorry, typical Malaysian joke), but I don't expect her to completely subdue her voice to come up with a completely toothless compilation of anecdotes that have no purpose other than to state the obvious.

But seriously, I've read worse. Every British expat that works in Singapore and Malaysia for a year or two, for example, often publishes a book when they leave about their "original" observations about life in those countries. A year or two of living in a company-sponsored condominium and sleeping with local barflies make them experts in Malaysian or Singaporean sociology, it seems. Allow me to say hi to my good buddy Neil who is now back in the UK after coming to Singapore, marrying a local gal, and then leaving everyone a goodbye gift that was his book about his five years of living in Singapore. On a dare from Neil, I approached a publisher with a suggestion about me, who have lived seven years in Singapore, to write a book similar in concept to Neil's. I got turned down. Local Chinese woman writing a book about local life? (I'm actually a Malaysian living in Singapore but I guess that still makes me a local in Singapore, heh.) It can't sell to an international market! So in a way, I'm glad to see that Ms Teh's book is available. Wait, then again, the publisher is a local publisher. Sigh. Oh, and Neil, I'll get about to paying you the fifty bucks I owe you one of these days.

Oh dear, I've completely gone off-tangent so I owe Ms Teh a big apology for turning what is supposed to be a piece about her book into something all about me. Back on topic, this book is pleasant reading in that Malaysians will surely see facets of themselves in many of the anecdotes in here. Unfortunately, this book is also a good example of how frustrating it can be to read someone's works in the local public media. If Ms Teh has more to say, and it seems to be that way in many of the articles here, she deliberately censors herself. But what can I say? Unfortunately, life is like that in this part of the world, which is why the local publishing industry will never take off. But that's another topic altogether.

Rating: 71

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