CHAPTER ONE

THE GREAT VOID

Nothing much happened to me on May 12, 2003. I just reached the bottom of the barrel, the nadir of my entire existence. What triggered this sense of absolute futility was something quite banal and trivial: I had spent the better part of the morning looking at used cars so I could present my son with one. Finally I found a reasonably priced 1986 Volvo sedan in respectable condition, and test drove it to my satisfaction – only to be informed when I got home that my son had decided to borrow his mother’s car on days when he needed to drive.

Instead of feeling pleased at not having to spend money on another vehicle, I felt oddly deflated... empty. I felt my life had been a complete and utter waste of time, a total write-off. Does everybody feel this way when they turn fifty? Was I experiencing the much-touted mid-life crisis? Male menopause? Was it some deadly species of post-millennial ennui... or was I catching a glimpse of The Great Void that confronts agnostics and atheists at the end of the line?

On the surface everything appeared hunky-dory. I was married to an honest, infinitely patient woman who had borne me two wonderful kids, a girl and a boy. My job was challenging and well-paid. I had just been released from two weeks’ quarantine, upon returning to Sydney from Singapore, where the SARS scare was in full flap. Remember SARS? What a terribly tautological name for a disease: Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. Not just severe but acute...

Anyway, I hadn’t died of SARS – even though at church I had conversed for twenty minutes at close quarters and shaken hands with Reverend Chua before the service, and he might well have visited Reverend Mok in hospital before the latter succumbed to SARS a couple of days later. Waiting out the two weeks, quarantined in my Sydney apartment, not allowed to see my family, I had plenty of time to think morbid thoughts.

I’ve had breathing problems since my late teens, so it wasn’t too difficult to imagine myself a goner each time I became aware of my lungs. I could picture my family sorting out my papers and belongings after the funeral: filing cabinets stuffed with manila folders full of bills and receipts, and reams of notes written in a neat hand on ruled paper, from years of quiet research on the nature of faith. Was that the only legacy I would leave? That of a meticulous chartered accountant and ardent amateur scholar? Another dutiful but obscure life bites the dust...

I decided to write my memoirs. But I’ve led a rather uneventful and sedentary life. Never survived a shark attack or rescued a baby from a burning shophouse. Not even runner-up in an international golf tournament. No string of Casanova conquests to confess. But I did have a grave confession to make: I had lost my faith in the religion of my birth, an evangelical variant of Anglicanism. Indeed, I had arrived at the conclusion that fundamentalist strains of religion are the primary obstacle to our attaining global peace and harmony.

My lonesome journey from believer to unbeliever was a story worth chronicling for posterity, I thought. But where does one begin? Maybe a brief outline of my family history would help define the cultural matrix into which I was born, and from which I emerged. Seems, at any rate, a sensible place to start.

My paternal great-grandfather, from whom we inherited the surname Chin, migrated from South China to Singapore in 1863, four years before it became a British Crown Colony. When the Malay States accepted British rule, he moved to the new capital, Kuala Lumpur. My grandfather was sent to English-medium schools run by Anglicans because his father couldn’t afford to pay the fees at the private Chinese-medium schools. As a result, grandfather converted early to Christianity and became an active evangelist, visiting a leprosarium once a week to rescue souls from disintegrating bodies. Most of his eight children consider themselves Christian, even if a few seem to have fallen by the wayside.

My father was the middle son in a family of three sons and five daughters. Both my parents are staunch Christian fundamentalists, though mother only converted after she married my father. So you can imagine the religious climate in which I was brought up, especially since my parents took their evangelism very seriously.

Now, there are many positive aspects of being grounded in a well-established belief system. For one thing, there’s much to be said about the sense of well-being that comes with toeing the line and feeling that Somebody Up There loves you and knows you to be a good sheep, a true believer. The very real sense of fellowship and belonging is perhaps the greatest appeal of being a member of any religious group, fundamentalist or otherwise. The acceptance of God as final arbiter in all our decisions, our protector and provider, leads to an absence of extreme stress in our everyday existence. The highway to fundamentalist heaven is well-paved and well-marked with clear and legible signs: Straight Ahead. Temporary Detour. No Entry. No U-Turn. No Speeding. No Parking. Toll Ahead. Next Exit 500 Meters.

All the answers to life’s questions are readily found in the Holy Scriptures. I can probably still quote you chapter and verse on any specific subject. And, certainly, I appreciate the deeply ingrained sense of moderation and modesty that came with my fundamentalist indoctrination; and the moral sensibility, in effect, basic human decency, that continues to govern my interactions with others.

In my late teens, while I was fervently evangelizing in the public domain, the Holy Bible was the primary tool of my trade. It was God’s Word to any person who would listen. My statements would typically begin with: “It is written in the Holy Scriptures that...” There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that the Christian Bible was inerrant and indisputably true. There was a passage in the Bible specifying that one would be subjected to God’s curses if anything was added, deleted or altered in any way. Another passage said God directly inspired the Scriptures. And since God is perfect, the logical conclusion was that the Bible must be perfectly applicable to all peoples, times, and circumstances.

From the perspective of Christian fundamentalism, understanding and tolerance of other cultures is extremely difficult, if at all possible. We were taught that only Christians would be granted salvation and eternal life. All others would suffer the everlasting fires of damnation in Hell. We believed that our neighbors, being pagans and heathens, were already doomed to this dreadful fate. In a Christian fundamentalist environment, young people are warned against reading “unauthorized” books. Any book that contradicts the teachings of the Christian Bible is proscribed. The banned book list would include even scientific literature – indeed, anything that touches on topics like the theory of evolution, genetics, archeology and paleontology. These types of books are assumed to be a major part of the Devil’s strategy to lure stray sheep into his lair.

In my youth I came upon hardly anything by way of reading material - and very few people - who might have guided me away from these fundamentalist attitudes of intolerance, judgmentalism, self-righteousness - and the misunderstanding and, therefore, rejection of other cultures and beliefs. Each religious group is, of necessity, committed to its own dogma and prescribed lifestyle. It’s perhaps understandable that parents would want to protect their young from the “contamination” of unfamiliar cultures, practices, and beliefs. But Christian fundamentalists, I can attest, are protective of their children’s “programming” to a reactionary extreme.

How I acquired an insatiable appetite for an ever increasing range of knowledge may be traced to an acutely embarrassing experience I had shortly after completing high school. I responded to an ad to become a commercial pilot by joining an airline as a rookie, earning a token allowance while getting the necessary flight training. At the interview I was asked to explain how aeroplanes stay airborne. I was stumped. What folly came out of my mouth to cover up my complete ignorance is best forgotten. The interview fiasco was acutely mortifying to my adolescent ego. I slunk out of the room dejected - but determined to never again be caught with my pants down in the “general knowledge” department. I became a voracious reader and tireless questioner. I wanted to find out everything about EVERYTHING. And to do that, I had to break a few taboos, especially about the sort of books I was going to stick my inquisitive nose into.

I was only five years old in August, 1957, when the British granted Malaya her independence. Six years later, Malaya merged with Singapore, Sarawak, and Sabah (formerly British North Borneo) to form the Federation of Malaysia. However, this arrangement lasted but two years before the usual politics of race and religion led to Singapore pulling out and becoming an independent island republic.

Father, being a Christian and an Anglophile, sent all his five sons to English-language schools in Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, known as KL to the locals. While we speak Hakka (a Chinese dialect) at home and Cantonese within the KL region, my brothers and I are only literate in English. Despite my lifelong exposure to spoken Chinese, I opted for fluency in English and familiarity with the culture of the English-speaking world – just as much of Europe during the days of the Roman Empire adopted Latin as the language of the ruling elite, and the Roman worldview as their own.

My family is part of a relatively small English-educated community compared to the Chinese- and Malay-speaking groups in Malaysia. There’s also a vociferous minority that speak Tamil (a southern Indian language). Kuala Lumpur boasts two of the nation’s most prominent English-medium schools: the protestant Victoria Institution and St. John’s Catholic Boys’ School. My father attended the Victoria Institution. My mother once remarked that my father couldn’t even write his own name in Chinese. He was utterly and thoroughly westernized in language and outlook. In fact, he was what some folks would call a cultural banana: yellow on the outside, white inside.