As told by Anna Vivienne to talantang.com editor Joseph Bingkasan.
I am the third child in a family of nine children.
My parents were paddy planters and while waiting to harvest their paddy, they would tap rubber.
They lived off the land, in every way, where my father would lay traps to catch animals for supplementary food to our usual rice and freshwater fish.
We lived in a village where the waterfalls were our main source of water, the stream our source of fish and the jungle our source of vegetables as well as other food like mushrooms and fungi.
Our house was surrounded by fruit trees such as Tarap, Cempedak and langsat as well as rambai among others.
Our house compound was planted with hibiscus plants, bananas and other flowering plants.
This traditional setting was not special to me until I understood that each plant had medicinal values.
The young leaves of the hibiscus trees when smash can stop the bleeding of minor cuts.
The layers of bananas can be used to lower down fever in young children among others.
Living in this environment gave me the knowledge at a very young age that nature was not always what it represented to the naked eye but had uses beyond what it showed.
Areca nuts for instance was always chewed by my elders, but this nut when thoroughly smashed can be applied on a baby’s stomach when it bloats due to wind…and believe it or not, at that time the baby would eventually pass wind and be rid of a painfully bloated tummy.
To add to this, I was an introverted child who didn’t speak much but listened a lot.
I would sit behind my mother and her mother in law, a bobolian and listened to them talk.
I would sit behind my grandmother while she speaks with her friends, all her age, and talk about happenings in the villages outside of ours.
She would talk about supernatural happenings and explain about some taboos and why it should be like this or that.
Children were not allowed to listen to adult conversations, so many times I got pinched and asked to go away, but I kept on coming back to listen.
When I was about 11 or 12 years old, for some reason I was sent to live with my bobolian grandmother.
That was when I listened to her more as she conversed with friends.
She would speak about her ghostly encounters, about her patients and their ailments among others.
She wasn’t a jovial person and she didn’t communicate with me much, but I listened well, there were many stories and beliefs and taboos that she spoke about that stuck in my mind to this day.
I was born during a time when there was a transition from animism and monotheism.
I therefore lived through and saw the past being replaced by religions,
I am not an animist but I relate the stories and supernatural beliefs and taboos that I heard. My parents were animists and believed in the spirits and power of nature, before they embraced Christianity.
These memories stayed with me into my adult life.
To this day I still pause and ponder on these beliefs when I see hear or feel something different.
I started writing when I was in Primary school, mostly it was drivels that fascinated and irritated my teachers.
I was an A pupil with a penchant for storytelling, which most people put down as being ‘full of myself’.
I have an active imagination, they said.
I took writing seriously in the 1970s when I subscribed to Kinabalu Weekends.
The Chief Editor at that time was Mr Ignatius Daim, a former teacher and journalist.
He read my stories and told me to never stop writing as I had the flair for storytelling.
I wrote many short stories for him until the newspaper closed down.
Years down the road, I joined the media.
My first stint was in RTM, as an Assistant Producer for the Blue Network.
That was when I started to go into Radio Drama.
I wrote scrips in both Malay and English. In English I was under the tutelage of Azizah Hj Itam, a well known radio presenter, script writer and very proficient in English.
She gave me the opportunity to participate in the script writing for ‘Coffee Talk’.
After RTM, I joined the mass media getting my first job as a cub reporter with The Daily Express.
I covered the general desk, the hotline desk and later to court assignment.
I was also introduced to feature writing by my then editor Eddie Lok.
He was a tough CE but I learned the ropes from him.
When he left, James Sarda took over and my knowledge in reporting was further enhanced.
I later left Daily Express for Borneo Mail and soon after that served Borneo Post.
I served in both papers for seven years respectively.
In all my stint in the newspapers, I always choose or get assignments for feature stories.
I thoroughly enjoyed those assignments and went through them without any complaints.
Through the years though I never left off writing scripts and had several stashed away in my computer in my office of that time.
Unfortunately the IT section flushed them all out during a server reboot.
I have learnt never to stash my work in office computers after that.
The two books I have published so far entitled Strange Magic and Supernatural Encounters and Hauntings and Ghostly Whispers were written in 2019 and 2020 respectively.
One was published and hit the market late 2019, thanks to the assistance of Datuk Ewon Benedick the then Ministry of Industrial Development.
The second book was launched recently, thanks to assistance from Mr Alexander Yee of United Tuaran Tourism Association (UTTA) and proprietor of Rumah Terbalik.
This book was launched by the Assistant Minister of Tourism Culture and Tourism Datuk Joniston Bangkuai.
What inspired these books one may ask.
The stories in the two books are garnered from stories I heard from the past, from my grandmothers, both paternal and maternal.
They were good strorytellers, often telling my cousins, siblings and I, these stories in the evenings around a kerosene lamp.
We would hear of people in ancient villages going around in their everyday life, or of warriors and headhunters, water spirits and magical land.
We would be told never to whistle at night, not to imitate bird calls in the night or be disrespectful when passing by banyan trees and many many more.
In my two books, I just fleshed out fictional people to act in situations based on these beliefs.
I hope these books will be able to reach more readers especially youth in this modern world of digital magic.
For our people, our youth, it is a glimpse of your past and how we grew up in those days when the world was peopled by spirits.
Editor: The first series of the book reviews will be published next week.
