The love poet
Armed with his books of love poetry, Alex Tan is choosing to follow his heart,
You can’t read the book quickly, you’ve got to take your time with it. It’s like a relationship. Alex Tan Bok Hooi
“LOVE is a lot like laksa !” begins Alex Tan Bok Hooi, grinning widely. Laksa? I raise my eyebrows. Hardly the words of a Bard, but he’s eager to explain his point further. “You know, when you eat laksa?” he asks.
It’s a rhetorical question of course, and he goes on to add blithely: “When you take a bite of it, you get a little bit of the sweet, sour and bitter. You can’t really pin that spoonful of laksa to a particular taste but you still think it’s unique!”
“That’s not very romantic-lah ,”I reply, chuckling. “When you compare love with laksa!”
Leaning forward, he replies thoughtfully: “But isn’t it a lot like love though? There’s a lot of feelings connected to love. It isn’t simply sweet all the way through... in the sense of embracing big, unwieldy, turbulent feelings.”
Tan has certainly a lot to say about love; and the sweetness and chaos that go along with it.
The youthful-looking 50-year-old has recently published a compendium of love poetry in two volumes aptly titled Heaven Speaks Loudest and When Chaos Reigns, that presents love in all her complicated glory — of giddying euphoria, imagination, heightened senses, expectations, ecstasy, disappointment and heartbreak.
“The title comes from a single line,” he explains smiling. “Heaven speaks loudest when chaos reigns.”
The main theme is love, of course, he says. “But love can be both sweet, bitter and sour like laksa!” he crows triumphantly before breaking into laughter.
Ah, laksa again. It shouldn’t be surprising, I tell myself. I mean, what can you expect from a Penangite who’s a hopeless romantic? You get a comparison between love and the famous Penang laksa!
“You can’t read the book quickly,” he instructs me. “You’ve got to take your time with it.” It’s like a relationship, he adds with another grin. “When you meet someone for the first time, you take your time in getting to know him or her, right?” Another rhetorical question, but I get him.
I too know a little about love. All my life I’ve willingly gone headlong in search of engulfment. Of course, there’s fear. If nothing is at stake — if there’s no risk of grief and desolation when you come out the other side — how can you ever really feel anything?
To be wholly dissolved and lost, whether in another person or in the presence of a work of art, in a spiritual encounter or in a greater cause, this can be dangerous, but also freeing — an escape from the prison of the self. You shouldn’t be able to walk away unscathed, which is to say, unchanged.
But what makes us reach for poetry? I’ve often heard the claim that it’s extreme events — a birth or death or love, for example — that sends people in search of verse to calm or enlighten or explain the particulars lost in the tumult of such emotion.
I remember turning to poetry during the throes of my heartbreak. Crying over a volume of Lang Leav coupled with a tub of chocolate chip ice cream did wonders for my wounded soul. Which is probably why Tan’s books resonated and hit all the right notes with me.
With a whopping 246 poems captured in two volumes, it may be that Tan is in love with love itself, with the way his books unfog and energise the experience of living.
He cops to as much in “Embrace”, which serves as both a mission statement and an early pivot for the first volume Heaven Speaks Loudest.
When you’re in love — when you’re so high that the earth “suddenly stops spinning / Time takes an infinite breather / In silence I hear the murmur of your heart.”
But as Tan memorably puts it, you’re also bound to get hurt. When Chaos Reigns brings us back to the reality that being in love also opens you up to pain and despair: “After our fiery ending /Battling with such intensity / With the moon prowling for blood / I lay collapsed with sunken hope.”
SEEKING TRANQUILLITY
“How much of your experience is in the book?” I ask.
He grins in response and takes his time to reply. “Of course, I derive a lot from my own personal experience,” he finally says.
“I’ve been in love before and I’ve also had my heart broken.”
Haven’t we all? But Tan still professes to be a romantic at heart.
“I still believe in the power of love,” the bachelor insists with a smile.
The Indian aunty in me wants to find out a lot more: Does he have a girlfriend? Does he write love poems for her? Has he found his soulmate at last? Can he tell me about his worst heartbreak?
I mean, every nosy aunty worth her salt — not to mention his own Chinese aunties who might be despairing of his singlehood — would want answers! But no, he declines to answer those “pertinent” questions.
“There’s got to be some mystery left,” he argues, adding cheekily: “The answers to some of those questions are found in my books. You’ve just got to read them to find out!”
But there still remains a lot that he’s willing to talk about. His eyes soften and a sense of nostalgic fondness creeps up his face as he reminisces about his growing up years.
“I was born in a small village in Bagan Dalam,” he begins. Those were wonderful years, he adds.
Sun-drenched days of spinning tops, flying kites and having so many playmates of various races. Tan treasures those sepiatoned memories to this day.
“I still go back to Bagan Dalam occasionally,” he remarks. “Whenever I want to experience that sense of nostalgia and reminisce about the simple life I had back in the days.”
“Those were the days,” he continues ruefully, “when we had no phones or television to distract us. Everything was personal. I had a beautiful childhood because it encapsulated everything a child could really want. You get to have the freedom that most children don’t have nowadays; you get to do what you like (and get away with it as well!) and you get to speak in different languages as well because of your multi-ethnic friends in the village.”
What languages did he pick up? “Oh I spoke Hokkien, Mandarin and of course, thanks to my Malay friends, I do speak decent Bahasa. Of course, my nonChinese friends also learnt to speak Hokkien and Mandarin too!” he replies.
LOVE OF LANGUAGES
He was a good student, he reveals.
“I played a lot, but I was also motivated enough to swot hard for my studies!” he says, chuckling. He was diligent enough to pore through copies of Malay magazine Dewan Masyarakat to improve his grasp of Bahasa.
“I started because I wanted to get good marks for my exams,” he confesses.
But as he leafed through the pages, he began to fall in love with the Malay language.
“During those days of SRP and SPM, we needed to write essays. I realised and noticed that the only way I could improve my language skills was to read a lot of quality magazines and books.
“From there, I soon discovered the rhythm of the language. As I grew familiar with the rhythm and nuance of the language, I started to enjoy writing in Bahasa and allowed my imagination to take hold of my pen,” he explains.
A little poetic there, I comment and he laughs. “It’s true!” he exclaims, shrugging his shoulders.
As he grew older, he obtained an antique typewriter from his cousin and started to craft stories late at night. Ah those turbulent teenage years, I tease him. He nods, eyes sparkling. “It was a time when the typewriter was the way I could pour my angst and heart into!”
He loved writing and wanted to attempt to write in Bahasa. “And I tried. After all, I’ve always been one to explore possibilities. You won’t know until you try, right?”
And tried he did. When he was 17, he submitted a story for a short story competition in Bahasa organised by Dewan Bahasa & Pustaka (DBP).
“I didn’t win of course, but I was proud to receive an invitation from DBP to attend a short story writing course in Kuala Lumpur!” He said yes, of course. “Anything to leave my small village and venture out into the big capital citylah!” he quips, chuckling.
Did he want to be a writer when he was a young boy? “Probably,” he muses. “But then, as with all young kids, I kept changing my ‘ambition’ a couple of times!” But one ambition stuck. “I really wanted to be a physicist,” he recalls.
The eldest of three children and the only son of a sundry shop owner and a housewife, Tan discovered he had an aptitude for maths and physics. “I’d always been a good student,” he says, candidly.
“But I was so fascinated with physics thanks to my physics teacher in secondary school.”
Tan went on to obtain his Bachelors and Masters in Science from University of Malaya.
In the meantime, of course, he also managed to author a number of short stories that were published by DBP as part of a compilation of several books, including Salji Masih Berguguran, Permata Nilam Biru and Tanglung Bunga Sakura. While he was still in varsity, Tan came out with his first full-length Malay novel, Topeng in 1992.
His English books, A Man and His Wallet & Other Stories and Love Will Find You & Other Stories, were selected for 50 Best Malaysian Titles for International Rights for 2016/17 and 2018/19 respectively. The recently published Heaven Speaks Loudest and When Chaos Reigns are Tan’s maiden attempt at poetry.
As he entered the corporate world, he stopped writing for a while.
“Life happened,” he explains ruefully. After stepping down as the marketing director for a medical equipment company not too long ago, he embarked into the world of entrepreneurship — and found the time to write again.
“You just got to take the leap and go with your heart!” he explains, smiling.
It’s all about the heart, I note and he agrees, nodding his head eagerly. “I mean, I’m an Aries. I like to think, like a typical Aries, I like to do everything with passion. That’s what defines me.”
And now poetry. “Yes, now with poetry. I stumbled upon a book by the poet Lang Leav and was immediately mesmerised by her poetry.
“Somehow, they struck a chord with me. Poetry about love and feelings always resonate with readers. And I thought, ‘why not try writing poetry for a change?’” he recalls, smiling. And he did, with pages of poetry that reveal the secrets of the heart.
In an age that privileges irony and cynicism, it can seem naive and a little retrograde to desire to be engulfed and be swept away by love.
In the 1963 poem
Mystic, the American writer Sylvia Plath asks what’s left after the ecstasy of revelation:
“Once one has been seized up / Without a part left over / Not a toe, not a finger, and used / Used utterly / What is the remedy?”
Still, Plath, perhaps our pre-eminent artist of the melancholy, offers a rare gesture of hope. The end, it turns out, isn’t the end. The last line: “The heart has not stopped.”
For as long as hearts are beating, love will continue to thrive. Tan offers this conclusion with a smile: “In times of darkness and chaos, love remains the best antidote.