The Wilderness

When I was growing up, our house backed onto an oil palm plantation, a systematically developed commercial agricultural compound replacing the once-verdant wilderness. They were tame as can be, our woods, and yet at night they still haunted our sleeps with unfathomable shadows, creepy whisper and occasional glimmer of mysterious sources. Year in and year out, they proudly stood and seemed to absorb, to swallow whole, all the monotony and ennui of your body and your world. Scary things could still be imagined to take place in those woods. It was the refuge into which my brothers and I fled after our mischievous endevour had been brought to the notice of my martinetish mother.

A minor but undeniable aura of heroism and nationalism was attached to the history of Klang, my hometown: a civil war broke out to claim the tax-collection rights of the strategic port and large tin deposit. When my childhood friends and I went out into those woods behind our house, we could feel all that history, those skirmishes between the warring factions, those forgiven warriors. You could work it into your games, your imaginings, your flights from the never-ending schoolwork.

My friends and I spent hours there, pretended that we were the despotic rulers, triad leaders and mine workers who had coloured up the narrative of our hometown. I could lose myself for hours on creeks and bushes: trapping and dissecting assorted organisms (I swear in the name of science) and simply staring out into the shifting clouds.

There's some reasons behind my childhood obsession with wilderness exploration. Historical epic, heroic tale and adventurous tale accompanied me in the childhood, from "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms" to "Journey To The West", come furnished with a map. That's because every story of adventure is in part the story of a landscape, of the interrelationship between human beings (or mischievous monkey and prurient pig, as the case may be) and topography. Every adventure story is conceivable only with reference to the particular set of geographical features that in each case sets the course, literally, of the tale.

But I think there is another, deeper reason for the reliable presence of maps in the pages, or on the book sleeves, of an adventure story, regardless of which genre it belongs. We relate to the idea of innate wanderlust; the notion of seeking in an arduous adventure the kind of heroism and danger, in terra incognita--that he or she could never hope to find in life.

Though much has changed over the years.

The helmeting and monitoring and the corralling of children into certified zones of safety have stifled the freedom of the young ones. All thanks to the efforts of helicopter parents and the generally increased consciousness of safety and danger.

But the primary reason for this curtailing of adventure, this closing off of wilderness, is the increased anxiety we all feel over the abduction of children by strangers; we fear the wolves in the wilderness. What is the impact of the closing down of the wilderness on the development of children's imaginations? This is what I worry about the most. I grew up with a freedom, a liberty that now seems breathtaking and almost impossible.

Art is a form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map. If children are not permitted or taught to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?