By Kee Thuan Chye.

Pondering the death of his dear frieng Gan Teik Chee, Kee Thuan Chye is unable to comprehend the manner of his passing. Gan was a key cultural figure in Penang and Malaysia.

I WAS STUNNED when a friend called from Penang on June 19 to tell me that Gan Teik Chee had just died. As far as I knew, Teik Chee had been health-conscious, watched what he ate (“No Ajinomoto ah,” he would tell the waiter when we went eating out together), and performed his yoga and meditation daily.

What I didn’t expect was the cause of death. “Bad news. Very, very bad news…” my friend repeated in a voice laden with emotion. Only after a long pause did he manage to tell me that Teik Chee had jumped from the eighth floor of a hotel.

“What?” I cried. “Why would he do that?”

I also wonder why a man who seemed to have everything would be driven to such a desperate act – for the Teik Chee I knew was financially well-off , domestically settled after many years of restless uncertainty, and, more than anything else, a brilliant man. He was one of the smartest people I had ever had the pleasure of encountering. Yet once, in a moment of self-irony and deeply-felt reflection, he said to me, “So smart that it hurts.”

The first time I came to know of Gan Teik Chee was when I saw him act in the Penang Players’ production of the American play The Rainmaker. That was in 1973. I was a university student then and he was already a pretty well-known lawyer. He was an unlikely actor – in fact, to be brutally honest, he was stiff . But to be fair, Teik Chee didn’t relish acting onstage. He told me frequently that he did it just to support the Penang Players of which he was a stalwart member. When I became its president for a few years in the 1970s, during which we staged some productions together, I got to know him better.

For all his reluctance to perform onstage, Teik Chee was, however, not averse to performing in the presence of his friends – spontaneously, that is, especially after he’d had a couple of drinks. Then, he would spout poetry, with passion and eloquence. Including French poetry. He especially liked Rimbaud.

If he didn’t recite poetry, he would talk ceaselessly. We’d let him hold court because whatever he said was invariably intelligent, interesting and, above all, entertaining. His vocabulary was immense, his off-the-cuff choice of words, spot-on. More than that, he had a wealth of knowledge and his insights into Malaysian politics were quite incisive.

The first time I met him remains unforgettable. Precisely because it was one of those occasions when he excelled in his volubility. It was in his home at Vermont Road where a small party was being held. He spoke candidly on a range of issues, his boyish, cherubic demeanour belying the sagacity of his views. And when the night got late, he said tipsily, “You guys can do what you want, I’m going off to bed to masturbate.” And left without ceremony.

I found him refreshingly different from the Penangites I’d known. I had also never met anyone who could discourse so passionately on things that his pitch would rise with his conviction and his voice might be raised to the point of shouting. Several times afterwards, when we were in public spaces like a restaurant or coffee shop and he got carried away in this manner, I was moved to look around to see if other patrons might wonder what we were up to.

This aspect of Teik Chee was something most people were not privy to. Many found him stand-offish, difficult, fastidious, even arrogant. He could be direct and rude in his remarks, insensitive about their effect. He didn’t suffer fools. If you said something he found inane, he would tell you off for it. In fact, I kena-ed from him a few times. Too embarrassing for me to recount here.

His lifestyle was rather spartan. It was best reflected in the decor of his home. There was a Zen-like atmosphere to it. Only a few pieces of essential furniture sat within the spotless white walls. Everything was spick and span and in its place. It spoke of Teik Chee’s fixation on order, neatness and cleanliness. Somewhat Monk-like (as in Monk of the TV series).

When he was younger, he was also a bit of a misfit, an outsider – the outcome of his public school life in England, followed by the study of Law there. He intimated to me that he hated his time in public school and wished his parents had never sent him to one. His formative years were spent in England, which therefore made him more accustomed to English ways initially. But as time went on, he made a conscious effort to re-adapt to Malaysian culture and environment – and succeeded. Even so, the first few times he came to stay at my home when he visited from Penang, I had to remind him to remove his shoes before entering the house. And although I could see that he seemed uncomfortable walking about barefooted, he obliged.

Actually, Teik Chee never forgot his roots. He could speak Hokkien fluently, much better than I can. He was also conversant in Malay. And although he mostly spoke absolutely proper English – with a neutral accent – he often lapsed into Manglish as well. He simply had a facility with language. So, naturally, he wrote poetry.

I think his poetry is among the best in English this country has produced. Forget the sloganeering and the cut-and-paste glibness of Cecil Rajendra or the cloying self-consciousness of Wong Phui Nam; Teik Chee’s poetry is experience, thought and language distilled to a delicate compound.

He was never satisfied with what he had written, so he would work and work at it until he got it perfect. A good example of his diligent crafting is this excerpt from “The Obvious Charm of the Bourgeoisie”:

The season’s awnings reverberate
to the gregarious feeding
of hungry ghosts and a redhead
eating cilipadi.

News comes that the deities
lie blinded in the seventeenth temple,
and limousines scatter
to hidden quarters of pleasure.

Rhythm and meaning gel together in this delightful opening stanza of “Zaman Ghaib”, brimming with inter-textuality which characterises a good number of his poems:

Having seen the dying of the light,
we are making fire with sticks.
Random sparks for a magic flame
against the man-made darkness.

From the crucible yet may pour
a crazy alloy to hold the canopy in spell.
Will the native colours blend
into the spinning wheel of dharma,
and so re-tell a fluent fable?

Teik Chee was a politically committed person. Keen to see reform in Malaysia, he was one of the founding members of Aliran, at a time when civil society movements were not yet the trend. In the mid-1980s, he was involved in a campaign against the Official Secrets Act. Later, he became a committee member of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST).

For his private self, I think he tried to sublimate his inner intensity with yoga and meditation and his belief in Buddhism. Even so, for a large part of his life, I sensed he felt unsettled, mostly because he found it hard to reconcile the difficulty of his relationship with his first wife, an Englishwoman named Wendy. It was all the harder to bear because she was the love of his life.

They looked odd walking together, her nearly five-foot-eleven towering over his five-foot-three, but that was the least of their oddities. He often told me that although they found it virtually impossible to live with each other – exacerbated by her unwillingness to adapt to local conditions and his refusal to settle down in England – they could be the best of friends who would discuss anything under the sun with ease and delight. I’m not exactly sure whether they finally got divorced after having talked about doing it for a long time, or whether for years after their divorce, they were still seeing each other, but it was the one of the longest goodbyes between any problem-ridden couple.

I was glad to hear that he eventually remarried, but by then we had not been in touch for a few years. The last time I saw him was in 2003, when I visited Penang and we went out for dinner with a couple of mutual friends. It turned out to be an occasion that ended with a fair measure of tension because one of them fiercely defended the then recent US invasion of Iraq while Teik Chee and I argued against it. We were both not as intense as our friend was, so we decided in the end to let him rant away. When it came to worthless causes, Teik Chee knew how to let go.

We spoke on the phone a few times in the ensuing years but didn’t see each other again. I now wish we had.

Teik Chee touched many lives, and even those who got to know him for only a brief spell came away impressed. When news spread of his death, I received SMSes, phone calls and e-mails from my friends who had been acquainted with him, asking what had driven him to it. A few of them had met him only once, at the most twice. I was struck by their concern, and more so by the indelible impression he had made on them.

I was unable, however, to answer their question. The way his life ended was uncharacteristic, perhaps un-Buddhist too. So how does one account for that? I suppose if Teik Chee were here, he would respond with this quote from The Tempest which he would have known by heart: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

Good night, sweet prince; and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

** Republished with permission. This article first appeared in the September 2010 issue of the Penang Economic Monthly. Kee Thuan Chye is an actor, playwright, stage director, journalist and author.

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