Fighting Fish
turning sour, like a rotting strawberry. “It’s all so different,” Aisya kept saying, as if stunned into repeating herself, like a broken toy. “I don’t recognise where I am.” On our way home, we stopped at a roadside stall for a snack. It was manned by only one shopkeeper, a young man who smiled hopefully when we arrived. I looked at the cheap plastic keychains, the reams of poor quality t-shirts pressed against one another on the hangers, the clunky, non-recyclable fridge magnets that inevitably end up in landfills. The excess of it all was overwhelming, and vaguely sickening. I’d never felt such an aversion to things before. Maybe isolation had done that to me. We couldn’t leave without buying something. Aisya and I paid for two small Totoro keychains, RM5 each. The shopkeeper smiled and said, with soft gratitude, “Thank you so much.” We walked home in silence, neither of us able to put our heartbreak into words. That was almost nine months ago. As soon as we got back to KL, we started the project. All shreds of self-pity had disappeared. Everyone knew the creative arts were hit hard by the pandemic, but what we hadn’t seen was that this wasn’t just affecting photographers, fashion designers, hipster Instagram personalities and recent graduates. There were more vulnerable creative communities whose livelihoods were at stake: gift shop proprietors, local printmakers, florists. We’d seen it. We felt ashamed of ourselves. The words kita jaga kita had taken on a whole new meaning. For two days, we sat on the sofa, illuminated only by the glow of our shared laptop screen. Our concept was to start a grassroots community intent on ecologising the Malaysian arts scene. What
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