For the module HI3001: 1984 - Past, Present, Prophecy, we're told to write an essay on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and how applying an aspect of it to another theme or text or incident can give us an interest reading. I decided to go with writing about one of the most intriguing and thought-provoking films I've watched: Parasite, directed by Bong Joon-ho. I'm pretty satisfied with my writing in this short piece, so I wanted to share it here as well. Have a read. :)
Victory Mansions vs. Aheyon-dong: The Stench of Nineteen Eighty-Four Told as an Unsettling Reality of the Lower Class “The real secret of class distinctions in the West… It is summed up in four frightful words which people nowadays are chary of uttering, but which were bandied about quite freely in my childhood. The words were: The lower classes smell.”

— George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

Nineteen Eighty-Four is often punctuated with the narrator’s acute observations of unpleasant scents that are normalized under Big Brother’s regime in the text’s dystopian society. Yet, when we attempt to apply these smells to the realities of today, bad smells are actually not contained within dystopian fiction: they are the telling realities of the world’s lower class. When dealing with actual applications of stench in today’s world, the fictional quality of the dystopia Nineteen Eighty-Four pales in comparison to the strikingly realistic setting of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite. Thus, while stench may seem to be a quality only present in dystopian fiction, in reality, it is the unavoidable sensation lower-class communities are forced to endure throughout their lives.

In the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the regime of Big Brother is characterised by unpleasant smells as noticed by the protagonist, Winston Smith. The very first chapter of the text opens with Winston returning home to “the hallway [that] smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats” (Orwell 3). The narrator’s use of a matter-of-fact and straightforward tone while including such a smell in the first setting of the text indicates how the smell is a ordinary feature of the world in which Winston resides. Furthering this assertion is how such smells are then described to be “usual” and “common to the whole building” (25), pointing toward how the owners of the entire estate are already impervious to the strong unpleasant smell throughout their entire area. With an opening that is partially yet noticeably defined by the stench of a living space, the introduction to the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four Such sets bad smells as one of the common traits of life under the regime of Big Brother.

Similar to Nineteen Eighty-Four, the film Parasite, directed by Bong Joon-ho, opens with a scene that is also primarily illustrated through actions that insinuate distressing smells. In the semi-basement where the Kim family resides, the family is portrayed to be immune to the foul smells that greet them every day. As they wake up, they endure the smell that mercilessly wafts from the drunk man’s daily piss outside their windows (Bong 00:06:07-00:06:24), and the reeking fumigation that the family believes will provide the usually expensive bug extermination services for free, even if it means bearing the uncomfortable fits of coughing (00:03:27-00:04:00). The striking visual quality of the film allows the stench of these actions to permeate the audience’s minds even more impactfully through the characters’ strong and apparent reactions, despite how impossible it is for the audience to actually smell the stench. For the poor, these smells are not matter-of-fact, they are vexatious. Yet, the smells are an aspect of life that they are made to face due to the conditions of their lives.

Hence, while both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Parasite open their stories with similar smells, the difference in genre indicates how the former’s depiction of stench, associated closely to the unpleasant state of living under a regime, is merely a fictitious quality. The latter’s form as a realistic film shot in actual places demonstrates how Orwell’s fictitious rigid regime is in actuality South Korea’s harrowing reality for the lower class. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston resides in the unpleasantly smelled “Victory Mansions” (Orwell 3), a neglected set of living space that technically does not exist in our world. What heightens this unrealistic quality is how Victory Mansions is set in the city of London, which, in the world of the text, is in the fictional superstate called “Oceania” (5). The striking difference between the geography of the text and that of our world lends the story an exaggerated trait that hinders readers from concluding the text as an actual representation of the world. In stark contrast, Parasite’s opening of the semi-basement is set in Seoul’s shantytown “Ahyeon-dong”, a real “district of crumbling brick buildings where rents for half-basement flats have doubled in the past decade” (McCurry). The choice of setting the Kim family in an actual geographical location in Seoul imparts the film a poignant semblance of reality, even if it is a fictional film. The smells in both works may be portrayed similarly, but the real setting of Parasite, when read against Nineteen Eighty-Four, illuminates the salient notion that stench is a reality for the lower class, and not a mere quality of fictitious regimes.

While the stench in Victory Mansions enriches the experience of being immersed into the dystopian world created by Orwell, its overtly fictional setting strongly dismantles its’ realism, drawing a bold line between the fictional world and the reality of today. The Kim’s semi-basement, however, provokes viewers by being set in an actual neighbourhood. The stench in Parasite thus reflects the reality of actual classist regime, whereas Nineteen Eighty-Four merely conjures one.

The New Policy

Last night, while I was catching dreams,
the rulers decided on a new policy: Malays are to speak only three hundred and seventy-one words in one day. Any more would result in immediate punishment.
No questions asked, no protests entertained.

In the morning, my mother warmly smiled. She kissed my forehead and I could sense stars in the silence between us before she left to teach Physics. I attempted to emit the same warmth she did. I understood. She had to save her words for her students.

On the way to the MRT, I kept to myself. My eyes were low and I kept my headphones on.
I was listening to an obscure Malaysian singer, when the fear of being caught singing along engulfed me. I broke my headphones into three.
A lady across the street (she did not look like me) shook her head.

In the MRT I faced the pole.
A crying child who looked like me tugged at my shirt. It hurt when I tore my eyes away from the steel. His dirty shoes and dead phone battery spoke for him.
I asked the child for details but he only wailed louder. I understood. He had to save his words. The sobs still felt like pelts to my ears.

By the end of our charade I knew I had one hundred and sixty-seven words left. I cursed. One hundred and sixty-six.

In the evening I met my lover. I was left with only eight words and they were for my mother for whom I would move the moon if I had to.
We held on to each other as he spoke, but I felt no warmth, only weight. His stories flowed from him, freely, like the Kallang river we were facing. Painless, unlike the crying boy in the MRT.

He does not look like me. In that moment, I resented him. I expressed it.

I went home with five, and alone.

Unbelievably, Year 1 of university has finally and actually ended. I'm now awarded with a three-month long holiday, the whole of which seems mostly filled with free time.

But strangely, I feel like I already miss studying literature. I miss being tasked to read books and develop fresh ideas on the texts I analyse. How great it is that I'm able to learn.

I realise that whenever I think about just how extremely fortunate I am to be blessed with the opportunity to actually learn what I truly love, I become really emotional and teary. It's such an amazing privilege, and I know that I'm guilty of taking advantage of it almost every single day.

I sound really emotional, but I guess that's because I am. Right now, there's a lot of emotions stirring in me, resulting in the unsettling feeling in my stomach. Most prominently, I am just so extremely and inexplicably excited for the years and semesters to come. I'm just so full of eagerness to learn new things, and broaden my very very narrow and limited perspectives.

May He make things easy for me. I also pray that in this path of seeking and gaining knowledge, there's the awareness to be humble and to carry out the amaanah of bearing the weight of knowledge.

In my Singapore Literature module this semester (my favourite mod of this sem), we study Breaking the Tongue by Vyvyane Loh. This particular text, in many ways, both mends and breaks my heart, and it's mostly to do with the fact that it touches on deculturalization.

According to Wikipedia, deculturalization refers to the "destruction of the culture of a dominated group and its replacement by the culture of the dominating group." 

So that's that. When someone, especially of a minority ethinicity and race, shed their culture, customs, and language away, and replaces all that with those of a majority's, which supposedly seem more appealing, intelligent, and strong, then it can be said that they have been deculturalized. For me personally, the former would refer to my Malay culture, and the latter would refer to white culture (because I'm not yet entirely informed what exactly white culture entails, I refer to just the English language).

As I sat through the lecture, I was brought back to my early madrasah days, when whenever my friends and I would converse in English, there would never be a single tinge of Singlish. It would be impeccable, and almost entirely grammatically sound. And I liked that. I liked speaking and reading and writing in English. It became my strongest language, and (unfortunately) it still is. 

I say 'unfortunately', because in that process of appreciating English, and it pains me greatly as I admit this, I neglected my Malay. It's not to the terrible extent of not wanting to speak it, nor did I cringe whenever people used it, it was just that I was uncomfortable with it. And that discomfort is enough to shame me. It doesn't roll out of my tongue as fluently as English does, it felt janggal. Awkward. And, fun fact, I learnt the word janggal from my peers when they told me how janggal I sounded whenever I spoke Malay.

Deep down, it always bothered me that I wasn't as proficient in my own mother tongue as I was in English. Because I loved Malay, I never disliked it or felt ashamed by it, I've always been fond of it. And, when I'm in my most depressed state, when I talk to myself, when I'm in my most private and personal state, when I talk to God, Malay is the language that breathes out of me. 

And yet, I still am very far from being proficient in it. Even as I type this out, it is more than clear that the language I'm most articulate with in expressing my thoughts is not Malay, it's English. It bothers me, it really does.

Though it's hard, I strive to improve my language, my bahasa, my Malay. I wish to never, ever be like Humphrey Lim, who worships the English culture as he rids himself of his own Chinese values. I do not wish to pride myself solely of the language of my own ancestors' colonialists. I wish to be effectively bilingual, and able to have Malay flow out of me as smoothly as English, or even better. Because that's who I am – I am Malay.

And with that, I end with the framework of Breaking the Tongue, an excerpt from the late Lee Kuan Yew's 1978 National Day Rally speech:

A person who gets deculturalised—and I nearly was, so I know this danger—loses his self-confidence. He suffers from a sense of deprivation. For optimum performance a man must know himself and the world. He must know where he stands. I may speak the English language better than the Chinese language because I learnt English early in life. But I will never be an Englishman in a thousand generations and I have not got the Western value system inside; mine is an Eastern value system. Nevertheless, I use Western concepts, Western words because I understand them. But I also have a different system in my mind.

A non-English person can speak only English, read only English, write only English, breathe only English, but they can never, in a thousand generations, ever be English.